101 Inspirational Quotes for Fresh Start to 2021

2020, thankfully, is in the books. It’s been an incredibly difficult year that most of us can’t wait to put behind us. And, while January 1, 2021, won’t be all that much different, a new year means a clean slate.

While things are challenging right now, let’s hope that the upcoming year will be better than the last. Not to be patronizing, but the darkest hour is just before dawn. And, to help you look forward to a healthier, happier, and more productive 2021, here are 101 quotes to welcome in the new year.

1. “No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.” — Buddha

2. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” — Neil Gaiman

3. “Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.” — Jonathan Huie

4. “The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.” — Craig D. Lounsbrough

5. “You are never too to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” — C.S. Lewis

6. “Another fresh new year is here

Another year to live!

To banish worry, doubt, and fear,

To love and laugh and give!”

— William Arthur Ward

7. “Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go. They merely determine where you start.” — Nido Qubein

8. “The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written.” — Melody Beattie

9. “You’ll never get bored when you try something new. There’s really no limit to what you can do.” — Dr. Seuss

10. “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

11. “Let all the failures of your past year be your best guide in the New Year.” — Mehmet Murat Ildan

12. “You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” — Hillary DePiano

13. “Each day is a new beginning, the chance to do with it what should be done and not to be seen as simply another day to put in time.” — Catherine Pulsifer

14. “Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction.” — Germany Kent

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

16. “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every New Year find you a better person.” — Benjamin Franklin

17. “In order to be successful in the new year, stay focused, develop a positive attitude, and be passionate about your dreams.” — Bamigboye Olurotimi

18. “Your success and happiness lie in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” — Helen Keller

19. “Life’s not about expecting, hoping, and wishing, it’s about doing, being, and becoming.” — Mike Dooley

20. “New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of the future.” — Munia Khan

21. “May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.” — Joey Adams

22. “Enter this new year with gratitude for this new chance to create your dreams.” — Avina Celeste

23. “If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” — Paulo Coehlo

24. “Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” — Carl Bard

25. “With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

26. “Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” — Oprah Winfrey

27. “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” — Winston Churchill

28. “It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. “This year, be structured enough for success and achievement and flexible enough for creativity and fun.” — Taylor Duvall

30. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.” — Abraham Lincoln

31. “A new year. A fresh, clean start! It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities!” — Bill Watterson

32. “Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.” — Tony Robbins

33. “Change can be scary, but you know what’s scarier? Allowing fear to stop you from growing, evolving, and progressing.” — Mandy Hale

34. “The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.” — J.P. Morgan

35. “Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas.” — Charles Kettering

36. “Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” — Robert Breault

37. “Be so busy loving your life that you have no time for hate, regret or fear.” — Unknown

38. “What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet.” — Anne Frank

39. “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Socrates

40. “Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous New Year by believing.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach

41. “Don’t ever feel like your best days are behind you. Reinvention is the purest form of hope. Make today your best yet!” — Phil Wohl

42. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela

43. “Each year’s regrets are envelopes in which messages of hope are found for the New Year.” — John R. Dallas Jr.

44. “What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.” — Vern McLellan

45. “Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So, let’s just wish each other a New Year.” — Judith Crist

46. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” — Albert Einstein

47. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” — Martin Luther King

48. “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” — Joseph Campbell

49. “You will never win if you never begin.” — Helen Rowland

50. “A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back—you just have to put the past behind you and find something better in your future.” — Jodi Picoult

51. “Today, I close the door to the past, open the door to the future, take a deep breath, step on through, and start a new chapter in my life.” — Anon

52. “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” — Maya Angelou

53. “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘it will be happier.’” — Alfred Lord Tennyson

54. “What you can do, or dream you can, begin it, Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”– Goethe (Faust)

55. “New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provide this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” — James Agate

Related: 8 Ways You Can Use Science to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Stick

56. “Don’t let today’s disappointments cast a shadow on tomorrow’s dreams.” — Unknown

57. “I close my eyes to old ends. And open my heart to new beginnings.” — Nick Fredrickson

58. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

59. “Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But, it doesn’t get better. You get better.” — Joan Rivers

60. “Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.” — Francis Bacon Sr.

61. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.” — Henry David Thoreau

62. “It’s never too late – never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.” — Jane Fonda

63. “You do not find the happy life. You make it.” — Camilla Eyring Kimball

64. “When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” — Shauna Niequist

65. “Nothing in the universe can stop you from letting go and starting over.” — Guy Finley

66. “You have the pencil and paper in your hand, you write the story of the upcoming year. May your story be a year filled with positive happenings and successes, with few erase marks and full of exclamation marks.” — Theodore W. Higginsworth

67. “As long as I am breathing, in my eyes, I am just beginning.” — Criss Jami

68. “Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” — Frank Scully

69. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” — Neale Donald Walsch

70. “Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” — Rumi

71. Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed. — Cavett Robert

72. “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” — William James

73. “You gotta find your best self and when you do, you gotta hold on to it for dear life.” — Cheryl Strayed

74. “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”– Harriet Tubman

75. “Each new year, we have before us a brand new book containing 365 blank pages. Let us fill them with all the forgotten things from last year — the words we forgot to say, the love we forgot to show, and the charity we forgot to offer.” — Peggy Toney Horton

76. “A New Year has tiptoed in. Let’s go forward to meet it.”– Anusha Atukorala

77. “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” — John D. Rockefeller

78. “Past and Present I know well; each is a friend and sometimes an enemy to me. But it is the quiet, beckoning Future, an absolute stranger, with whom I have fallen madly in love.” — Richelle E. Goodrich

79. “You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.” — James R. Sherman

80. “New year is another opportunity of seeing life with little more caring, compassion, maturity, and beauty.” — Amit Ray

81. “Approach the new year with the resolve to find the opportunities hidden in each new day.” — Michael Josephson

82. “We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

83. “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals; adjust the action steps.” — Confucius

84. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren

85. “Last year told you what you needed to know. Now it’s go time.” — Richie Norton

86. “You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you.” — Eckhart Tolle

87. “It is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.” — Larry Page

88. “Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.” — Danny Kaye

89. “For a change, don’t add new things in your life as a New Year’s resolution. Instead, do more of what’s already working for you and stop doing things that are time-waste.” — Salil Jha

90. “I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” — Arthur Rubenstein

91. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” — John Steinbeck

92. “The past has no power over the present moment.” — Eckhart Tolle

93. “Well, we have a whole new year ahead of us. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all be a little more gentle with each other, a little more loving, and have a little more empathy, and maybe, next year at this time we’d like each other a little more.” — Judy Garland

94. “The attraction of New Year is this: The year changes, and in that change, we believe that we can change with it. It is far more difficult, however, to change yourself than turn the calendar to a new page.” — R. Joseph Hoffmann

95. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” — Pablo Picasso

96. “If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.” — Dolly Parton

97. “There is nothing magical about the flip of the calendar, but it represents a clean break, a new hope, and a blank canvas.” — Jason Soroski

98. “My best ideas come to me when I’m bored. I’d love to be bored more, but there just isn’t time.” — Sam Reich

99. “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” — Michael Altshuler

100. “When we get home at night, we plug in our phones. But we don’t think of ourselves as phones that need to be recharged. You need to make sure you’re getting back up to 100%.” — Bobby Berk

101. “Sometimes a year has been so disastrous and so terrible that entering a new year will automatically mean entering a wonderful year!” — Mehmet Murat ildan