These January quotes will inspire you. January is the first month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the first of seven months to have a length of 31 days.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging January quotes, January sayings, and January proverbs.
Famous January Quotes
- “January is the month for dreaming.” ~ Jean Hersey
- “Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “If I had my way, I’d remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead.” ~ Roald Dahl
-
“January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings.” ~ Anne Truitt
- “Come, ye cold winds, at January’s call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.” ~ John Ruskin
- “If January is the month of change, February is the month of lasting change. January is for dreamers… February is for doers -” ~ Marc Parent
- “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” ~ Edith Sitwell
-
“January brings the snow, makes our feet and fingers glow.” ~ Sara Coleridge
- “Pale January lay
In its cradle day by day
Dead or living, hard to say.” ~ Alfred Austin - “We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.” ~ Ellen Goodman
- “To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
- “Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
-
“It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.” ~ Wallace Stevens
- “January is here, with eyes that keenly glow,
A frost-mailed warrior
striding a shadowy steed of snow.” ~ Edgar Fawcett - “I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver
- “The Snow-drop, Winter’s timid child,
Awakes to life, bedew’d with tears.” ~ Mary Robinson -
“That grand old poem called Winter” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Moonless winter night-
a billow of rising fog
hides the distant pines” ~ Lenard Moore - “The twelve months…
Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,
Showery, Flowery, Bowery,
Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy,
Breeze, Sneezy, Freezy.” ~ George F. R. Ellis - “From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I’m bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.
Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.
My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.” ~ James Parton - “Dirty days hath September
April June and November
From January up to May
The rain it raineth every day
All the rest have thirty-one
Without a blessed gleam of sun
And if any of them had two-and-thirty
They’d be just as wet and twice as dirty.” -
“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Feeling a little blue in January is normal.” ~ Marilu Henner
- “Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
- “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.” ~ Charles Lamb
-
“Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.” ~ Hal Borland
- “Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.” ~ Dave Barry
- “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
- “You’d be so lean, that blast of January
Would blow you through and through. Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might
Become your time of day.” ~ William Shakespeare - “O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire
The streams than under ice. June could not hire
Her roses to forego the strength they learn
In sleeping on thy breast.” ~ Helen Hunt Jackson -
“The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “When the snow is still blowing against the window-pane in January and February and the wild winds are howling without, what pleasure it is to plan for summer that is to be.” ~ Celia Thaxter
- “Dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.” ~ Helen Fielding , January quotes New Year
- “Winter dawn is the color of metal, the trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps — but, O ye hours! Follow with May’s fairest flowers.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
“January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer’s forehead.” ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
- “Through the chill of December the early winter moans… but it’s that January wind that rattles old bones.” ~ John Facenda
- “No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.” ~ Charles Lamb
- “We are the last remaining country to allow ourselves two breaks in the season. You just have to look at England, Italy and Spain, they play right through the season. We on the other hand take six weeks off in the winter until the end of January, and that is a luxury.” ~ Franz Beckenbauer
- “Soon will set in the fitful weather, with fierce gales and sullen skies and frosty air, and it will be time to tuck up safely my roses and lillies and the rest for their winter sleep beneath the snow, where I never forget them, but ever dream of their wakening in happy summers yet to be.” ~ Celia Thaxter
-
“I was born in my parents’ bedroom on January 16. The World Almanac says it was 1909. I say it was 1912. But what difference does it make as long as I feel 33?” ~ Ethel Merman
- “Leaves like rusty tin for the desolate mind that has seen the end the barest glimmerings.
Leaves aswirl with gulls made wild by winter.” ~ Giorgos Seferis - “I started singing for The Phantom in January, and we started filming in October and I sang all the way through to the next June. In fact, I was singing for about two months before I even knew I had the role.” ~ Gerard Butler
- “People hit the sauce in a big way all winter. Amidst blizzards they wrestle unsuccessfully with the dark comedy of their lives, laughter trapped in their frigid gizzards. Meanwhile, the mercury just plummets, like a migrating duck blasted out of the sky by some hunter in a cap with fur earflaps.” ~ Amy Gerstler
- “The hiss was now becoming a roar – the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow – but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.” ~ Conrad Aiken
-
“There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.” ~ Hal Borland
- “The sun came out,
And the snowman cried.
His tears ran down
on every side.
His tears ran down
Till the spot was cleared.
He cried so hard
That he disappeared.” ~ Margaret Hillert - “Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.” ~ Robert Frost - “There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.” ~ Edward Kennedy
- “January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm-clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December.” ~ Christina Rossetti -
“In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.” ~ Christina Rossetti
- “The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was put into effect on January 1, 1863, but news of the Proclamation and enforcement did not reach Texas until after the end of the Civil War almost two years later.” ~ Corrine Brown
- “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne? For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.” ~ Robert Burns
- “An estimated 7 million illegal immigrants were residing in the United States in January 2000. This is double the size of the illegal immigrant population in January 1990 and constitutes 2.5 percent of the total U.S. population of just over 281 million” ~ Gary Miller
-
“I miss everything about Chicago, except January and February.” ~ Gary Cole
- “Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered…sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “Today expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold on to it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits.” ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
- “January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: […]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.” ~ Patricia Highsmith
- “I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood.” ~ Bill Watterson
-
“It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.” ~ Boris Pasternak
- “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.” ~ Wallace Stevens
- “Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.” ~ Annie Dillard
-
“For it one sits not unto fresh May Forto be coupled to cold January.” ~ John Lydgate
- “December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.” ~ Stephen King
The first day of January month is known as New Year’s Day. It is, on average, the coldest month of the year within most of the Northern Hemisphere
