"May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early. My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall." (Robert Clark)
"The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to." (P. J. O'Rourke)
New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. (Mark Twain)
Bill Vaughan
Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
James Agate
New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
Bill Vaughan
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
Charles Lamb
New Year's Day is every man's birthday.
Oprah Winfrey
Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right.
Mark Twain
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.
Anonymous
Many people look forward to the New Year for a new start on old habits.
Joey Adams
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.
Oscar Wilde
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Robert Paul
I'm a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit rounder, but still none the wiser.
Anonymous
A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one Year and out the other.
Leonard Bernstein
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
G. K. Chesterton
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
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A New Year's resolution is a secular tradition in which a person makes a promise to undertake an act of self-improvement or something nice, such as opening doors for people or smiling at taxi drivers beginning from New Year's Day.
The ancient Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts.
The Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus, for whom the month of January is named.
In the Medieval era, the knights took the "peacock vow" at the end of the Christmas season each year to re-affirm their commitment to chivalry.
There are other religious parallels to this tradition. During Judaism's New Year, Rosh Hashanah, through the High Holidays and culminating in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), one is to reflect upon one's wrongdoings over the year and both seek and offer forgiveness. People may act similarly during the Catholic fasting period of Lent, though the motive behind this holiday is more of sacrifice than of responsibility, in fact the practice of New Year's resolutions partially came from the Lenten sacrifices.
The concept, regardless of creed, is to reflect upon self-improvement annually.
Some examples include resolutions to donate to the poor more often, to become more assertive, or to become more environmentally responsible.
Popular goals include resolutions to:
- Improve physical well-being: eat healthy food, lose weight, exercise more, eat better, drink less alcohol, quit smoking, stop biting nails, get rid of old bad habits
- Improve mental well-being: think positive, laugh more often, enjoy life
- Improve finances: get out of debt, save money, make small investments
- Improve career: perform better at current job, get a better job, establish own business
- Improve education: improve grades, get a better education, learn something new (such as a foreign language or music), study often, read more books, improve talents
- Improve self: become more organized, reduce stress, be less grumpy, manage time, be more independent, perhaps watch less television, play fewer sitting-down video games
- Take a trip
- Volunteer to help others, practice life skills, use civic virtue, give to charity, volunteer to work part-time in a charity organization (NGO)
- Get along better with people, improve social skills, enhance social intelligence
- Make new friends
- Spend quality time with family members
- Settle down, get engaged/get married, have kids
- Try foreign foods, discovering new cultures
- Pray more, be closer to God, be more spiritual
- Be more involved in sports or different activities
Success rate
A 2007 study by Richard Wiseman from the University of Bristol involving 3,000 people showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, despite the fact that 52% of the study's participants were confident of success at the beginning.
Men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting, (a system where small measurable goals are being set; such as, a pound a week, instead of saying "lose weight"), while women succeeded 10% more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends.
It is also noted that talking with a counselor about setting goals and new year resolutions can help people keep their resolutions.
Boa sorte!
Comments
The Portuguese make promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return stolen and borrowed objects and pay their debts.
We would be grateful for the laptops, TV, mobile phones and camera stolen from us 9 months ago ... whilst we were in town. Someone clocked us there and somehow arranged a lightning visit.
Pepper spraying our harmless dogs ... destroying a door to get in. Damaging furnishings.
The GNR doing nothing more than give us a crime number. Finger printing inspection a painful joke as we then learn that Portugal only keeps the finger prints of criminals already in prison. Which puts them low on the list of 'likelies' to have done our house. No DNA check of a cigarette left behind (we don't smoke) as Portugal has no criminal DNA database. And no follow up to check on our trauma ....
So a New Year Eve for us just like most other Evenings ... indoors with the doors locked.
Be warned newcomers - this part of Portugal's economy never suffered in the crisis and is doing splendidly today.