Blog: My New Year's Resolutions are to Make None

Never have. Never will. For I couldn’t see any sense in lying to myself or others that I could keep them for longer than one day, much less than throughout the year. 

For to believe I could would be as fatuous as my pledging to be less critical of the commissioners in the New Year.    

Here are some other randomly selected New Year quotes to start your year with a hearty laugh or at least with a wry smile:

• “New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody, save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks and humbug resolutions.” (Mark Twain)

• “Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve; old age is when you’re forced to.” (Bill Vaughan)

• “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.” (Joey Adams)

• “New Year Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time (James Agate)

• “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in; a pessimist stays up late to make sure the old year leaves.” (Anonymous)

• “The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk, with the drunkenness culminating on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.” (P. J. O’Rourke)

• “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” (Oscar Wilde)

• “Drop last year into the silent limbo of the past; and let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.” (Brooks Atkinson)

• “Many people look forward to the New Year for a new start on old habits.” (Anonymous)

• “From New Year’s on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns.” (Leonard Bernstein)

• “A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.” (Anonymous)

• “Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year; even when a new century begins, it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” (Thomas Mann)

• “Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people; so overweight people are now average…which means you have met your New Year’s resolution.” (Jay Leno)

• “Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly; so let’s just wish each other a bile-less New Year and let it go at that.” (Judith Crist)

• “Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility; and breaking them is part of the cycle.” (Eric Zorn) 

• “It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets.” (William Thomas)

• “One resolution I have made, and try to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.” (John Burroughs)

Now, despite my skepticism about the value, or of the lack thereof, in making resolutions as the clock strikes midnight heralding the start of a new year, I’ve always made a daily resolution for God’s ears alone: “To be a better man for you and me.”

And that he has let me remain on earth for eight decades is, so I’d like to think, a sign that he hasn’t given up on me completely.