If you Google 'regret and tattoo,' you will get 11.5 million hits.

doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct

Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly, it reminds us that we know that we could do better.

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.

The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.