Quotable Quotes: New Year’s Day
by Miki Saxon
One great thing about the holidays is that it makes choosing a topic easy.
What do you do New Year’s Day? Does it have significance for you beyond hangovers, bowl games, friends and food?
Is it a day of reflection or one for making resolutions?
I’m not a believer in resolutions, but people keep making them. Common wisdom says A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.
Mark Twain agrees with that senitment, only puts it far more strongly, New Year’s Day – Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Resolutions are often made in the heat of the moment and the ability to see them through stems from MAP or, as Cavett Robert puts it, Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
‘Resolution’ has another meaning that resonates much more than the New Year’s type and one into which I fully buy; in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.
I also like the words of Edith Lovejoy Pierce to describe this day, We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
Finally, in an effort to offer a bit of insight, dare I say wisdom, on the first day of 2011 I share with you the words of P. J. O’Rourke, If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/noe0712/3198441177/
