Regrets Quotes

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I'm done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

“Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.”
― Sarah Ockler, Bittersweet

“When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You're not living if you're not regretting.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
― C.G. Jung

“regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“You can run. You can keep running to the ends of the earth. But I won’t be far behind you.”

“Ethan—”

“No. I will never be far behind you.” He tipped up my chin so that I could do nothing else but look back into his eyes. “Do the things you need to do. Learn to be a vampire, to be a warrior, to be the soldier you are capable of being. But consider the possibility that I made a mistake I regret—and that I’ll continue to regret that mistake and try to convince you to give me another chance until the earth stops turning.”
― Chloe Neill, Hard Bitten

“People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Best of Me

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.”
― Bill Watterson, It's a Magical World

“You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.”
― Gayle Forman, Where She Went

“Regrets

Timing is irrelevant when two people are meant for each other. It's what I once believed.

But we met during a time when I was such a mess, when I still had so much to figure out. How could I have known how crucial every word, every action was or how losing you would be something I would always regret?

If only you could have met me now, how different it would be. How much I have changed. How I have grown. I learned so much from all the mistakes I made with you. I just wish I had made them with someone else.”
― Lang Leav, Lullabies (Volume 2)

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.”
― Steven Erikson, House of Chains

“This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.”
― Omar Khayyám

“There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.”
― Fleur Adcock

“Čovjek je proklet, i žali za svim putevima kojima nije prošao.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”
― Anna Quindlen, Black and Blue

“It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“Don’t you think it’s actually harder for you . . . to adapt, I mean? Because you’ve done all that stuff?’
‘Are you asking me if I wish I'd never done it?’
‘I’m just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you’d led a smaller life. To live like this, I mean.’
‘I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are the places n your memory that you can go to.’ He smiled. It was tight, as if it cost him. ‘So if you’re asking me would I rather be reminiscing about the view of the caste from the minimart, or that lovely row of shops down off the roundabout, then, no. My life was just fine, thanks.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“My love for you will be a constant in a sea of unknown variables. We may fight or be cross with each other, but our love will never fade or wilt. Trust in that. Trust in us. Forget the future. Forget worry. The only thing that terrifies me is the possibility of living with regret. I don't ever want to wake and wonder what life could have been like with you in it. I don't ever want to regret holding myself back from loving you as fully and openly as possible.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Capturing the Devil