ALBANY — Governor Paterson is opening his administration with a conciliatory tone, urging lawmakers to put aside “personal politics, party advantage, and power struggles” and craft a budget that he said should represent a compromise between the interests of government and business.

“We are looking at the economy that is reeling, and I must say to all of you in government and all of you in business that you must meet with me in the next couple of weeks and adjust our budget accordingly,” Mr. Paterson said after he was sworn in as New York’s 55th governor, succeeding Governor Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace last week amid allegations that he was a regular customer of a high-end prostitution ring.

The somber message — delivered amid alarming reports of stock market turmoil and the government-backed fire sale of the venerable investment bank, Bear Stearns — stood in contrast to the celebratory tone of the swearing-in ceremony in the grand Assembly chamber, where lawmakers greeted Mr. Paterson with what seemed like a hero’s welcome.

While signaling to lawmakers that his assumption to the state’s highest office would usher in a tone of collegiality that was missing from the truncated tenure of his predecessor, Mr. Paterson, 53, gave a familiar overview of challenges confronting the state and did not lay out any new directions in policy.

He spoke of a “crumbling upstate economy,” the “crush of property taxes,” and the plight of families who cannot afford health care, but he did not hand down any prescriptions.

Mr. Paterson, who was Mr. Spitzer’s lieutenant governor, has two weeks to hammer out a budget deal with lawmakers, who are pressing for tax and spending increases and are counting on him to be more accommodating than the former governor.

Short on policy specifics, Mr. Paterson mostly stuck to abstract themes of continuity, service, and resilience.

“Let us grab the unusual opportunities that circumstance has handed us today, and put personal politics, party advantage, and power struggles aside in favor of service in the interests of the people,” he said.

Mr. Paterson did not mention Mr. Spitzer, who did not attend, by name, but made it clear that he appreciated the lessons from his predecessor’s stormy dealings with the Legislature.

“With the nation’s eyes upon him in 1964, Robert F. Kennedy once said, ‘No matter how talented an individual may be, no matter how much energy he might possess, regardless of how much integrity and honest he or she may have, if that person is alone, they can accomplish very little,'” he said. “And so what we are going to do from now on is what we always should have done. We’re going to work together.”

In what was perhaps the most direct reference to Mr. Spitzer’s legal and personal troubles, Mr. Paterson said, “This transition today is an historic message to the world that we live among the same values that we profess, and that we are a government of laws and not individuals.”

And while he said he learned about government as a lawmaker, Mr. Paterson, a state senator for 21 years, let it be known that he was no longer one of them. “Let me reintroduce myself. I am David Paterson and I am the Governor of New York State,” he said.

While the ceremony lacked many of festivities — the receiving lines, concerts, and food vendors — that accompanied Mr. Spitzer’s inauguration more than a year ago, the atmosphere during yesterday’s transfer of power was one of jubilation, almost like a campaign event.

The surreal shock that brought Albany to a standstill last week has given way to a sense of relief for lawmakers, for whom the swearing-in of Mr. Paterson finally drove home the reality that Mr. Spitzer was banished from the statehouse.

One might assume the spectacle of a ruined governor would have had a demoralizing effect on a statehouse trying to shed a reputation for scandal and corruption. Mr. Spitzer is the second statewide official to resign in disgrace in a little more than a year. About a dozen lawmakers have been investigated, indicted, or convicted in the past five years.

The enthusiastic cheers for the new governor were not simply an expression of solidarity with the new leader but a show of strength in the face of humiliating headlines and a joyous affirmation of the departure of a man they had viewed as an adversary.

“They’re punch-happy,” a Republican senator of Brooklyn, Martin Golden, said.

As a state lawmaker representing Harlem, Mr. Paterson rarely spoke of periods in his life when he lived in other parts of the state, choosing to emphasize his neighborhood roots. Now, having ascended to the state’s highest office, Mr. Paterson played up his experiences in other parts of the state, noting that he was “born in the borough of Brooklyn” and “was educated on Long Island.”

Mr. Paterson, who had memorized his speech and did not use notes, spoke for about 20 minutes, devoting more than half the time welcoming by name the legislative leaders and various political dignitaries — including two former governors, George Pataki and Hugh Carey; Mayor Bloomberg; Senators Clinton and Schumer; Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, and Governor Jodi Rell of Connecticut — in the audience below.

The new governor infused the first part of his speech with ample humor, giving it almost the feel of a wedding toast. Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, recalled the time when the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, gave him lessons for handling a gavel so as not to break nearby glasses of water.

“The speaker at the last second grabbed the gavel away from me and he told me in his own inimitable way, as only Shelly can, ‘I will not allow you to turn the State of the State into a Jewish wedding,'” Mr. Paterson said, doing a spot-on impression of Mr. Silver’s gravelly baritone.