You’ll seldom experience regret for anything that you’ve done. It is what you haven’t done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you’ve lost them forever.
—Wayne Dyer (1940–2015) American Self-Help Author
You can’t regret what you can’t remember.
—Lisa Birnbach (b.1957) American Writer, Editor
Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.
—Carlos Castaneda (1925–98) Peruvian-born American Anthropologist, Author
One’s best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.
—Robert Kiyosaki (b.1947) American Businessperson, Author, Motivational Speaker
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Every noble work is bound to face problems and obstacles. It is important to check your goal and motivation thoroughly. One should be very truthful, honest, and reasonable. One’s actions should be good for others, and for oneself as well. Once a positive goal is chosen, you should decide to pursue it all the way to the end. Even if it is not realized, at least there will be no regret.
—The 14th Dalai Lama (b.1935) Tibetan Buddhist Leader, Civil Rights Advocate, Author
There is many a thing which the world calls disappointment, but there is no such a word in the dictionary of faith. What to others are disappointments are to believers intimations of the way of God.
—John Newton (1725–1807) English Clergyman, Writer
There is nothing to regret—either for those who go or for those who are left behind.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American First Lady, Diplomat, Humanitarian
How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38) English Poet, Novelist
The best enjoyment is half disappointment to what we intend or would have in this world.
—Gamaliel Bailey (1807–59) American Journalist
My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
The disappointment of manhood succeeds the delusion of youth.
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) British Head of State
I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret … if you have any sense; and, if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.
—Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) American Actor, TV Personality
We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.
—Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) Canadian Novelist
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68) American Civil Rights Leader, Clergyman
Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love.—The shores of existence are strewn with them.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael (1766–1817) French Woman of Letters
Disappointments are to the soul what a thunder-storm is to the air.
—Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German Poet, Dramatist
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
—George Sand (1804–76) French Novelist, Dramatist
Speak when you are angry—and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–90) Canadian-Born American Author
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
—Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.
—Sivananda Saraswati (1887–1963) Indian Hindu Spiritual Teacher
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfilment of that hope never entirely removes.
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English Novelist, Poet
Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
What people expect to happen is always different from what actually happens. From this comes great disappointment; this is the way the world works.
—Buddhist Teaching
Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains. And the time that remains is time enough, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting.
—Arthur Brisbane (1864–1936) American Newspaper Editor, Investor
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