Regret Quotes

Even four harnessed horses cannot bring imprudent words back into the mouth.

Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise.

I can't remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me, so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.

I missed 100% of the shots I didn't take

But woe to him, who left to moan, Reviews the hours of brightness gone.

When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee!

Will you look back on life and say, 'I wish I had,' or 'I’m glad I did'?

I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn't have said. Called him names I shouldn't have called him. I apologise for that. I'm sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight.

As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?

. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute - look at it and really see it - live it - and never give it back.

For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.

If it turns out that my best wasn't good enough, at least I won't look back and say that I was afraid to try; failure makes me work even harder.

I regret that the presentation I made at the UN turned out to be wrong. It was wrong on the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but pretty much right on intentions and capabilities.

I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn't you?

There was a very cautious man Who never laughed or played He never risked, he never tried, He never sang or prayed. And when he on day passed away, His insurance was denied, For since he never really lived, They claimed he never really died. (Anonymous poem)

Say it to them. Or say it to yourself in the mirror. Say it in a letter you'll never send or in a book millions might read someday. I think you deserve to look back on your life without a chorus of resounding voices saying 'I could've, but it's too late now.'

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."

When I look back on my life, I don't have regrets about what I didn't do. If I'd become a musician, it could have ruined my life.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

I felt Holyfield was using his head illegally. I told the referee I wasn't getting any help, so I went back to the streets. I cannot defend it, but it happened.

I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.

Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.

I'm not afraid to die - it's just that I had so much left to do in this world.

The only shot I ALWAYS miss, is the one I don't take!

Reckless youth makes rueful age.

I've been burdened by questions I've asked myself a thousand times since the last time we were together. Why did I do it? And would I do it again? It was I, you see, who ended it.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own.

If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.

Words, how little they mean when they are too late.

Real life is a funny thing, you know. In real life, saying the right thing at the right moment is beyond crucial. So crucial, in fact, that most of us start to hesitate, for fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But lately what I've begun to fear more that that is letting the moment pass without saying anything. I think most of us fear reaching the end of our life, and looking back, regretting the moments we didn't speak up. When we didn't say "I love you." When we should've said "I'm Sorry." When we didn't stand up for ourselves or some one who needed help.

But love that comes too late,Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,To the great sender turns a sour offense,Crying, 'That's good that's gone.

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.

I was too young to know how to love her.

There are not many regrets that I have. There are a few things that I wish I'd changed in my life, but they are not so dramatic that I'd go out of my way to change them. But I go back and think about my life so far periodically in my head.

Once a positive goal is chosen, you should decide to pursue it all the way to the end. Even if it is not realized, at least there will be no regret.

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened

When you are doubting whether a thing is worth the trouble of going to see, recollect that you will never again be so near it. You may repent not having seen it, but you can never repent having seen it.

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because the regret is stronger than gratitude.

Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it.

I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

There are several things I think I would have done if I had the chance again. I would have been a little more patient about getting out into the world. I would have seen to it that I had a more formal education. I would have become an accomplished mu

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

I remember the very thing that I do not wish to; I cannot forget the things I wish to forget.

I never regret anything... I just lie about it or change the story.

Time is man's most precious asset. All men neglect it; all regret the loss of it; nothing can be done without it.