Quotes About Regret

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else--grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.

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?

Regret is an odd emotion because it comes only upon reflection. Regret lacks immediacy, and so its power seldom influences events when it could do some good.

Above all, I regret that scientific experiments-some of them mine-should have produced such a terrible weapon as the hydrogen bomb. Regret, with all my soul, but not guilt.

I always tell myself that we are born here not to work, but to enjoy life. We are here to make things better for one another, and not to work. If you are spending your whole life working, you will certainly regret it. No matter how successful you are in your career, you must always remember that we are here to live. If you keep yourself busy working, you will surely regret it.

In life you don't regret the things you do, you regret the things you don't do.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

My biggest regret is rolling in regret. It is best to pick yourself up , dust yourself off and move on.

I’d rather trust and regret than doubt and regret.

Living in regret will become your biggest regret.

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?

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

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?

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!

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

Stop. I don't do you favors, Alec. I do things for you because - well, why do you think I do them?" Something rose up in Alec's throat, cutting off his response. It was always like this when he was with Magnus. It was as if there were a bubble of pain or regret that lived inside his heart, and when he wanted to say something, anything, that seemed meaningful or true, it rose up and choked off his words. "I need to get back to the ship," he said, finally.

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

In the end you regret less the things you believed that weren't true than the things that never came true because you didn't believe.

I think that the whole idea of ‘no regrets’ was always a silly idea to me, because of course I regret all the places I went wrong, but that’s what creating anything, and being human, is all about. Of course if I could go back and knew what I know now, I absolutely would do it differently, I’d do it the right way, but part of being human is that we can’t go back, we can only hope that if we come across that moment again, we’ll do it the right way.

Do not regret the past. Look to the future.

Someone sits in a mountain vale A robe of clouds, rainbows for tassels The fragrant forest is the place to live The road has been long and difficult With a heart full of doubt and regret A life has passed and nothing has been accomplished Others call it failure I stand alone devoted to this Cold Mountain life

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.

I don't regret any tweets. I'm not a tweeter and deleter. So I have no regrets.

I'm one of those fellas who's got lots of regrets, but I don't regret having regrets.

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.

Tap into that one fear that drives greatness - the fear of regret.

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

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness & all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past & not enough presence.

Your remarks upon chemical notation with the variety of systems which have arisen, &c., &c., had almost stirred me up to regret publicly that such hindrances to the progress of science should exist. I cannot help thinking it a most unfortunate thing that men who as experimentalists & philosophers are the most fitted to advance the general cause of science & knowledge should by promulgation of their own theoretical views under the form of nomenclature, notation, or scale, actually retard its progress.

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

I don't regret anything. I feel like I've made what I would call mistakes. I picked the wrong movie, or I didn't pursue a character, but everything you do is part of you and you get something from it.

To think, after all this time, after all the searching and all the waiting, after all the regret and the time she'd spent away, she came back to find that happiness was right where she's left it. On a football field in Mullaby, North Carolina. Waiting for her.

I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—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 is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice... No one can live in the light all the time.

You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it.

I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. (...) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret.

I think that my parents' only regret is that they wasted so much money on my stupid prestigious university degree.

May you get exactly what you want and live long enough to regret it.

I do sometimes think I could have done without the drugs actually; that was a waste of time, and a huge risk. But then again, there's nothing I can change, so in a way regret is pointless.

I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism.

If you have confidence in your own words, aspirations, thoughts, and actions and do your very best, you will have no need to regret the outcome of what you do. Fear and trembling are lot of the person who, while stinting effort, hopes that everything will come out precisely as he wants.

Now that we are cool, he said, and regret that we hurt each other, I am not sorry that it happened.

Nothing is more usual than the sight of old people who yearn for retirement: and nothing is so rare than those who have retired and do not regret it.