I am a fan of pithy quotes that emanate from one’s personal experience but so richly describe what we all encounter in life. In honor of the New Year, I gathered a few quotes that describe the possibility of new beginnings. I wish for great discoveries, invigorated learning, and new starts for all those in our community, and a happy, healthy and successful 2013.

• Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. -Henry Ward Beecher
• The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. -Steve Jobs
• Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. -Gilda Radner
• The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.- Arnold Bennett
• How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world. - Anne Frank
• There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting. -Buddha
• And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that never were. - Rainer Maria Rilke
• I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. -J. B. Priestley
• Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. -Saint Francis of Assisi
• The beginning is the most important part of the work. -Plato
• A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew. - Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
• Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. -Theodore Roosevelt
• We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves, otherwise we harden. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do. -Liz Smith
• A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be. -Bruce Springsteen
• Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. -George Bernard Shaw