Regret Quotes

Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.

~ Claire Holden Rothman

Don't show a friend your gift, or your bag of money if you still want to maintain your relationship, but if nay, go on, and all you'll see is hate and jealousy, and you'll fight with him in the street like a dog and all you'll feel is regret.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

How to win in life:1 work hard 2 complain less 3 listen more 4 try, learn, grow5 don't let people tell you it cant be done6 make no excuses

~ Germany Kent

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Happiness changes the way you see the world.

~ Auliq Ice

This life-enhancing, happiness-inducing miracle drug that does, in fact, ruthlessly kill its enemies—you’ve guessed it—is gratitude.

~ Auliq Ice

..he wanted her.And at another time, as another man, he would have her. Without hesitation. As lover. . . as more.

~ Sarah Maclean

Hope is the easiest thing that turn into dust.

~ Prachi Prangya Agasti

I look back at Tori, who’s watching him looking worried and poised as if she’s about to rush over and help him at any moment. I can understand how the kid runs into tables when she’s near. There’s something about her that makes you want to stop and stare and not look away. I feel a ping of regret when I remember that all of this is unfortunately temporary.

~ D.l. Hess

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden

~ R.a. Salvatore

I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself — my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

I am forever grateful for not knowing—What would have been. WHAT WILL BE holds none of those bittersweet pangs and it is lit w joy.

~ Erica Goros

Some of us live in the future,Connected to hurts from our past,If tomorrow is colored by bitter regret,Then today has been painted blackSome of us live in the presentConnected to gifts from our past,If tomorrow is colored by purposeful thought,the today's masterpiece has been cast.

~ J.a. Conner

Regret is the strongest anchor that latches on to the ground, and you carry it within you, it is a feeling quite unlike others for it is despair mingled with hope.

~ Saim .A. Cheeda

She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made—in other and higher words, after the will of God.

~ George Macdonald

18. Your life is before you. Be careful of the choices you make now that you could regret later. This regret is the subject of an old poem whose author has been forgotten. I hope you’ll never have reason to apply it to yourself. Across the fields of yesterday, He sometimes comes to me A little lad just back from play— The boy I used to be. He looks at me so wistfully When once he’s crept within; It is as if he hoped to see The man I might have been.

~ James C. Dobson

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed, you should try not to hear them.

~ Philip K. Dick

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?

~ Dan Simmons

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.

~ Ekaterina Sedia

Dear as remembered kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

~ Alfred Tennyson

I could kill you a thousand times over Abraham, but we would never be even. You took everything I had.

~ Christopher Buecheler

If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.

~ Shilpa Agarwal

s father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.

~ Pierce Brown

Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.

~ John Le Carré

I had a dream that I saw shooting stars with you. Two things that will come close to never happening: Seeing shooting stars, and being with you.

~ Karen Quan

The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self...from within.

~ T.f. Hodge

How I wish I could undo it all … take it all back…All those years I spent unhappy with him …. when I should have been looking for you.

~ Ranata Suzuki

Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

~ Ranata Suzuki

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

~ Omar Khayyám

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell

~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.

~ Mark Strand

When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything - that is the definition of conviction.

~ Criss Jami

Have the courage to rise from the challenges of life like a phoenix from the flames or you'll get lost in the ashes of despair, pain, and regret.

~ Nanette Mathews

we met one strange summerin a regular tangle of sticky websyou had the air of angels sweet but I--drowned with the damned spiritsin lava oceans fearing your--foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes(I swear they are even if you--think otherwise): stormscalm ones, calmer than my--raging coals, empty and deadyou speak of souls like you believealways an optimist in pessimisticskin of ivory and titanium mesh...

~ Moonshine Noire

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...

~ George Gordon Byron

La luz del pasillo iluminaba débilmente mi rostro que se reflejaba de modo fantasmal en el cristal de la ventanilla y me hacía recordar el que tuve en la infancia, el que naufragó para siempre en la despedida, como si aquel niño se hallara agazapado en algún lugar de mi interior esperando un descuido mío para emerger de nuevo en las aguas fangosas del pasado con su sonrisa feliz y sus ojos brillantes.

~ Elia Barceló

It’s my life and I’m not afraid to LIVE it! I would rather experience the ups and downs of a life I have chosen, than to suffer the regret of a life I have settled for.

~ Steve Maraboli