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.

My biggest regret is that I've assisted the media in making me into a cartoon character. I don't regret what has happened to me, but I regret the way I have dealt with it.

Boldness in the course of a noble fight is worth the risk... If you stand on truth, you'll only regret your timidity later, but you'll never regret being bold.

People said to me, "You know, when you record a special, you're going to regret it. The one thing you'll regret because you're a comic is you'll think of better tags."

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we've violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret-regret is useless.

Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.

It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

I regret my lack of options. I regret being painted into a corner and having that be the only instrument to get me from point A to point B.

I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

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 do not have regrets. I believe I helped preserve the peace for this country. Why should I regret that? What I accomplished was approved by Congress -- which represents our people. All of you live in safety from domestic enemies because of security from the police. Likewise, you live in safety from foreign enemies because our military keeps them from attacking us.

I don't think anybody should regret the choices they made in their twenties.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to 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.

Was I the best husband? No. And I regret it.

Sometimes when you record an album in the end, there are things here and there you regret production wise or in composition.

I think we all suffer from guilt at some point in our lives, but for the most part I never really regret, and I try to always remain positive. Yes, I think that those issues are very interesting to play in a character, and they're prominent issues in life, and I think people can relate to them.

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.

I regret that he didn't do anything about it, even though he was at least a head taller than me. I wouldn't have minded bleeding at all for one more opportunity to give the kind of Bat Lesson that Finger, Robinson, Sprang and others only dreamed of.

Many new churches, I regret to say, can be described from the design point of view only as holy terrors.

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius.

The most frequent cause of regret for what we have done is because its effects interfere with what we would do.

I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. But please do not sit up there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions I have made. Because, sir, the truth is I don't.

...the power of prayer can never be overrated. They who cannot serve God by preaching need not regret. If a man can but pray he can do anything. He who knows how to overcome with God in prayer has Heaven and earth at his disposal.

For a well-made cup of coffee is the proper beginning to an idle day. Its aroma is beguiling, its taste is sweet; yet it leaves behind only bitterness and regret. In that, it resembles, surely, the pleasures of love.

It's so much worse to regret something you never did. It's often worth running through your fears to their logical conclusion to help disperse them. One footnote - if life has taught me anything it's to trust the shy people. Popularity means a lot of people like you a bit, you have broad appeal. But who wants broad appeal? Interesting people are always a bit niche. Remember what Steven Patrick Morrissey said: "It takes guts to be gentle and kind.".

I'm not naturally a gifted dancer, and I don't enjoy it. I didn't go to any of those classes in drama school 'cause I was like, "I'm not going to dance. I don't need to learn to dance." I regret that.

God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.

I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.

She was fabulously wrong when she said it the first time, and stunningly arrogant in her refusal to express any regret for lying to our fellow citizens.

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

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

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

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

Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.

Believe me - I've done very good stuff and very crazy stuff, and I don't regret the crazy stuff.

Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

Time will make it worse! You're...the other half of his soul. He's never going to get over you. And no matter how much you hope that you will... you'll never get over him. You're going to wake up one day and realize what you've done, and you're going to regret the time you wasted apart from him for the rest of your life.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

A certain recluse, I know not who, once said that no bonds attached him to this life, and the only thing he would regret leaving was the sky.

Don't make me regret this", I said breathless. "You haven't regretted me once.

For every person who atones, a hundred others find regret sufficient.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

I never sort of really regret anything because you make your choices and I like to stand by them.

To overcome prejudice, we can boldly speak against it and teach our children total intolerance for it. We can get to know one another; when we do so, the stereotypes that impede relationships will fall away. Finally, we can express regret to others for past prejudicial sins and ask God to forgive us and change our thinking.

The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.