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.

Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

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.

You'd think, 'What if I make a mistake today, I'll regret it'. I don’t believe in regret, I feel everything leads us to where we are and we have to just jump forward, mean well, commit and just see what happens.

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.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

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

First, imagine taking the potentially regret - producing path of inaction. Then imagine what the very best outcome would be were you to take this risk. By picturing both scenarios in advance, you can avoid the regret of what might have been.

When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do.

Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.

I cannot regret it. They tell us in the temple that true joy is found only in freedom from the Wheel that is death and rebirth, that we must come to despise earthly joy and suffering, and long only for the peace of the presence of the eternal. Yet I love this life on Earth, Morgan, and I love you with a love that is stronger than death, and if sin is the price of binding us together, life after life across the ages, then I will sin joyfully and without regret, so that it brings me back to you, my beloved!

The only things I regret, and the only things I'll ever regret are things I didn't do. In the end, that's what we mourn. The paths we didn't take. The people we didn't touch.

Life is all about change. We cling to what we know and what we have, and then we lose it, and then we regret not having it and try to replace it by finding and changing to something else.

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

Never, never, never, hire people with an attitude. You will regret it.

Regret is such a pointless emotion, don't you agree?

No. No, I don't believe you'd betray me with her. I don't believe you'd cheat on me. But I'm afraid, and I'm sick in my heart that you might look at her, then at me. And regret.

Try Jesus, you won't regret it, a billboard read.

I'd love to do a golf movie. I turned down Don Johnson's role in 'Tin Cup.' I regret that.

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.

I wouldn't waste a day, not an hour, not a moment. Take what you want and damn caution. Live, enjoy. Feed ravenously. Or the biggest regret you'll have at the end of your life is wasted time.

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.

Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn't dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder!

I don't regret the decision to retire. My body was losing its edge. I was taking longer to recover from injuries. You have to get out at some point.

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

I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

If you do not master the art of self discipline- you will succumb to the emotions and reality of regret.

But we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for the women we leave behind.

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.

Indeed, Xcor stayed away for the wrong reason, the bad reason, an unacceptable reason—in spite of all his training, he found himself choosing Throe’s life over ambition: His anger had taken him in one direction, but his regret had led him in another. And the latter one was what won out.

As a member of the New York Senate from 1966 to 1989, I voted 12 times to establish the death penalty in New York... I regret my votes in favor of the death penalty.

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

My father died very suddenly at sixty-three. Just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I'd ask myself, Why didn't I ask him to play golf more? Why didn't I spend more time with him? But when you're off trying to get the brass ring, you forget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there's nothing you can do about it. So you just forge on.

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.

Do not regret the past. Look to the future.

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake--Pancakes! Pancakes!--that we never learn to respect.

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.

While it is a cause for regret that Fischer did not continue to produce scintillating games, he perhaps had a greater impact on chess than any other twentieth century player

I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is.

There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church. I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated

But I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen; Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again.

She wasn't afraid of difficulties, what frightened her was having to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant missing out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now.

Regret and fear are twin thieves that rob us of today.

Don’t give up. You’ll regret it.

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.

I think that we have to be very careful and get back into the loop, get back to nature. Get back to God and not let the technology send us somewhere that we're going to regret.