Quotes About Regret

Sometimes I think the point of old age is to be embarrassed about one's youth.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

Like ghosts, past failures haunt us.

Remorse is the pain of sin.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? [Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]

They were all getting too old too fast. Alison wished that someone had warned her about this while she was in high school. People get old really fast. Take it easy and learn to forgive. She wondered if she would have known what that meant in high school.

It was strange. ... If she'd never gone to the Amazon, never met Ash, she would most likely have been perfectly content with Todd. She wouldn't have understood those fleeting flashes of emptiness that come upon a per¬son from time to time. Now she knew what they were: the yearning for what could have been, for the road never taken.

I'm sorry," Rose repeated as she kicked the fridge door closed with a bare foot and carried a carton of orange juice to the counter. She was dressed in folded up jeans, boots, and a black tank top. Her eyes were puffy; she hadn't been awake long either.

Leave your wife and children, never have contact with them again, and I will give you a life of luxury. He sold his soul. And he'd done it with both eyes open.

So when I go home, sometimes, even when I had an amazing game, I always think about what I missed.

Remember that lost time does not return.

O that we had spent but one day in this world thoroughly well!

I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.

Profound theology doesn't make anyone righteous; what pleases me is an exemplary life. Regret for wrongdoing is better than knowing its definition.

Time is what we want most, but what alas! we use worst. – William Penn

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it!

Though true repentance be never too late, yet late repentance is seldom true.

Repentance is the vomit of the soul.

Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.

This was why sudden death was so feared: it did not give you time to put your spiritual house in order. You might have meant to repent but hadn't quite got round to it. Too bad. Down you go. All the way.

Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.

The ghostly consciousness of wrong.

The tragedy of life is not so much what we suffer but what we miss.