Quotes About Regret

What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And [he] thought he had the answer. Regret. Regret for things said, things done, and things not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.

We suffer one of two things. Either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. You've got to choose discipline, versus regret, because discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons.

Listen widely to remove your doubts and be careful when speaking about the rest and your mistakes will be few. See much and get rid of what is dangerous and be careful in acting on the rest and your causes for regret will be few. Speaking without fault, acting without causing regret: 'upgrading' consists in this.

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

It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done.

And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness. But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement. They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

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.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

On out deathbeds we're not going to regret all the work we didn't do. We're going to regret all the sex we didn't have!

I never regret anything. I always said that when I'm old, I want to be sitting there regretting the things that I did and not the things that I didn't do; and now I'm old, and I don't regret anything! I had fun. I had fun, and I'm still having it.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

All I can do is engage with complete sincerity. Then whatever happens, there is no regret.

Dear Nintendo, We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s ‘damaged goods’, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom ‘do you still love me?’ you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.

You don't realize that if you stop looking backwards craving the love and acceptance which you didn't receive from your parents, then you might open your eyes to what is available for you now. But you won't let go. If only you could see that looking back into an incomplete and imperfect past, with regret, blame, guilt or resentment is keeping you from the treasures that await you here now. The past has gone. You cannot rectify something that is no longer with you.

Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.

Our lives are made in these small hours, these little wonders, these twists & turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain. All of my regret, will wash away somehow. But i can not forget, the way i feel right now.

In my flowery dreams there's always you. I do not regret it one bit.

Live your life like you're 80 looking back on your teenager years. You know if your dad calls you at eight in the morning and asks if you want to go out for breakfast. As a teenager you're like no, I want to sleep. But as an eighty year old looking back you have that breakfast with your dad. It just little things like that, that helped me when I was a teenager in terms of making choices you won't regret.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. [...] I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

There is no justice. There are occasional acts of vengeance, or regret, but there's no real justice. In the natural scheme of things, it is not possible.

NVC self-forgiveness: connecting with the need we were trying to meet when we took the action that we now regret.

I'd rather regret doing something than not doing something.

If you learn from Saint Thérèse to depend on God alone and serve him with a wholly pure and detached heart, then you can join with your whole soul in singing the jubilant song of the holy Virgin, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” And like little St. Thérèse you will be able to say at the end, “I do not regret that I have given myself to love.”

I don't regret anything I've ever done; as long as I enjoyed it at the time

Remember, the pain of rejection is nothing compared to the pain of regret.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked.

Pretty much I don't regret anything that has happened in my life. One thing is I wish I could have spent more time with my mama and my pa.

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

I regret the ending of our friendship and hope one day before we die, we'll make peace with each other . . . No rush.

I was up for Michael Corleone in 'The Godfather,' but, as I was only 10 at the time, I think Mr. Coppola made the right choice. The Julia Roberts role in 'Pretty Woman' held a bizarre allure for me. But, it's silly to look back with regret.

In my experience, we only ever regret the things we have not done.

The sins I regret the most are the one's I didn't commit.

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.

A moment of prayerful reflection can prevent a lifetime of bitter regret.

Do you lend books and DVDs to people? If so, don't you always regret it? All my life I have forced books on to people who have subsequently forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, on my shelves sit many orphaned books loaned to me over the years by trusting, innocent souls - some as long ago as the Seventies.

I smoked for almost 10 years. I really regret that. Thankfully, I came out on the other side. I hope my lungs are repairing themselves now.

When five up express, as is polite, regret at laying a stymie, but rejoice in your heart.

I don't think anything I do in life is planned. Sometimes I regret that and I feel like I try to take ahold of the wheel, but I'm also always super excited when things pop up spontaneously and when I'm a little bit out of my depth. I just find that that thrills me.

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.