Quotes About Regret

I veri paradisi sono i paradisi che abbiamo perduto.

an excellent man, with whom I am sorry now that I did not converse more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies)

One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.

Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back." ...

If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!" PLACE-NAMES:

There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.

Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there.

He turned his head to avoid seeing the happy tableau of pleasures that he had passionately loved and that he would never enjoy again.

Dire que j'ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j'ai voulu mourir, que j'ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n'était pas mon genre!

Her eyes seemed to promise a spirit forever capsized in the diseased waters of regret.

She wept over the vanity of her desires, which had so ardently flown to the blossoming flesh that now had already withered forever.

Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their appearance; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen new girls go by, whom we shall not see again either.

I called to mind the noble glance, kind and compassionate, of that Albertine, her plump cheeks, the coarse grain of her throat. It was the image of a dead woman, but, as this dead woman was alive, it was easy for me to do immediately what I should inevitably have done if she had been by my side in her living body (what I should do were I ever to meet her again in another life), I forgave her.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.

Now conscience wakes despair That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

Was I to have never parted from thy side? As good have grown there still a lifeless rib. Paradise Lost, Book IX, l. 1154

I am lonesome for all the conversations we never had.

do not damage yourselves By attending only at the hungry altar Of regret and anger and guilt.

When we are overtaken with a sin, we sometimes fail to analyze how we fell. This is to our great disadvantage. We repent of the sin, but we do not consider the temptation that was the cause of it.

And it may be matter of encouragement in this respect, though one also of regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than nature crushes human power. It does not need much to humiliate a mountain.

They didn't talk for a while. Johnson popped the top on the second beer, took a long swig, then tossed the nearly full can over his shoulder and down the hill. "Good-bye, old friend," he said. "I'll believe it a year from now," Virgil said. Johnson: "Say, this whole stop-drinking thing . . . it doesn't include margaritas, does it?" —