Regret quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside regret — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Listen, O drop, give yourself up without regret, and in exchange gain the Ocean. Listen, O drop, bestow upon yourself this honor, and in the arms of the Sea be secure. Who indeed should be so fortunate? An Ocean wooing a drop! In God's name, in God's name, sell and buy at once! Give a drop, and take this Sea full of pearls."
"The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance."
"When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do."
"MY greatest regret in life is that I never became the heavyweight boxing champion ofthe world."
"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."
"Let the dead Past bury its dead!"
"Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf. For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things. And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light."
"Some of our children are our justifications and some are but our regrets"
"Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do."
"And through our travels we get separated, never forget: In order to survive, got to learn to live with regrets."
"O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret."
"True it is, that he who has taken off his affection from the goods of this world has already sold all, and has made himself poor, so far as depends upon himself; but the fruit and the proof of this spiritual poverty are, patiently to endure the loss of worldly goods, and without any regret, when it pleases our heavenly Father that we should be despoiled of them."
"Let us live so we do not regret years of inertia and ignorance, so when we die we can say all of our energy was dedicated to the noble liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own."
"I know, that since life is our most precious gift, and as far as we can be absolutely certain, it's given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity, and ignorance, and in our last moments we can say: 'All my life, all my conscious energies, have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit - beginning with my own'."
"I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning."
"Regret is an uneven hand, a rough palm at the cheek — tender and calloused."
"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."
"I regret the unhappiness of princes who are slaves to forms and fettered by caution."
"Take the stupidest thing you've ever done. At least it's done. It's over. It's gone. We can all learn from our mistakes and heal and move on. But it's harder to learn or heal or move on from something that hasn't happened; something we don't know and is therefore indefinable; something which could very easily have been the best thing in our lives, if only we'd taken the plunge, if only we'd held our breath and stood up and done it, if only we'd said yes."
"We can't afford to waste tears on might-have-beens. We need to turn the tears into sweat that can take us to what can be."
