Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.

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.

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.

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

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

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