Quotes About Regret

No one can avoid a challenge in life without breeding regret, and regret is the arsenic of life.

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

Not that I regret saying what I believed to be the truth, but I regret anything that I might have written or spoken that could have been used in a way to help to foster that atmosphere out of which came the loss of life of Brother Malcolm.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Living in regret will become your biggest regret.

You will regret many things in life but you will never regret being too kind or too fair.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

for every person who's stepped out of line and lived to regret it, there are two people who stayed in line because they got their values mixed and lost their nerve, and who have lived to regret it still more. You don't hear about those people because they're still in line where they don't show.

People always tell me I'm going to regret not having kids. But what if I have one and then I regret having it? Has anyone thought of that option?

I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.

What's my greatest fear? I don't know; I have lots of fears. Regret, I don't want to have any regrets; that makes me scared.

I have always believed that there is no point in having regrets as you learn far more from mistakes than successes. Embrace a mistake and learn from it; don't regret them.

A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

I don't regret the painful times; I bare my scars as if they were medals.

I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.

I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Never say never. For the right reason, over the years I've been auctioning off masks for charity and it's always for a good cause. I think you would regret it if you just sold it for money.

She was all he wanted. He would give everything for her. Without thought. Without regret.

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.

Always regret the things you did do, never the things you didn't.

Later in my life, I'm going to look back and smile and be very fulfilled. I know that if I don't give it my all right now I'll regret it later. That's very important to me, because I've worked all my life to have this.

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on.

If you summon your courage to challenge something, you’ll never be left with regret. How sad it is to spend your life wishing, “If only I’d had a little more courage.” Whatever the outcome may be, the important thing is to step forward on the path that you believe is right.

We must embrace the fact that if we don't commit to thinking and living differently than most people now, we are setting ourselves up to endure a life of mediocrity, struggle, failure and regret-just like most people.

Don't regret growing older...remember that a lot of sugar is to be found at the bottom of the cup.

she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't do

Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.

With FIVE DAYS, Douglas Kennedy has crafted a brilliant meditation on regret, fidelity, family, and second chances that will have you breathlessly turning pages to find out what happened in the past and what will happen next. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, it is a powerful new work of fiction by an internationally acclaimed writer at the height of his powers.

What kind of heart does one have to have in order to be able to get rid of these, without regret, as if they were empty beer cans?

I took pleasure when I could. I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky.

Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit.

The only possible regret I have is the feeling that I will die without having played enough tennis.

She was quiet for a moment or two. Then she said: Cruel words are a terrible thing, Quash. Sometimes you regret them. But what's been said cannot be unsaid.

One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot but feel regret that 20 or 30 years of life may have been spent without the least knowledge of him.

And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning. I tried to smile. For him.

People say, 'Well don't you regret not having kids?' And I go, 'No, not really.' And then if they keep asking, I always say this, 'Well, you know, maybe I'll adopt.' But I don't mean that. It's just something I say to make me sound like a nicer person.

My biggest regret is that I didn't teach my two children how to speak Spanish.

The calm. If there is God or something Higher for me it is this. The calm. If there is something that will hold me when I need to hold it is this the calm. There is no anger, no rage, no Fury. There is no want, no need, no desire. There is no hatred no shame no regret. There is no grief, no sadness, no depression. There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live.

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?

Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as my last. There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.