Best 2371 quotes in «regret quotes» category

All his life he'd dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he'd long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he'd been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what's left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.

All this is what it means to regret.

All year long you are close to me And, like formerly, happy and young! Aren't you tortured already By the traumatized strings' dark song? Those now only lightly moan That once, taut, loudly rang And aimlessly they are torn By my dry, waxen hand. Little is necessary to make happy One who is tender and loving yet, The young forehead is not touched yet By jealousy, rage or regret. He is quiet, does not ask to be tender, Only stares and stares at me And with blissful smile does he bear My oblivion's dreadful insanity.

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

Always be truthful and you will have fewer visits from regret, guilt or fear.

A man without regrets cannot be cured.

A meaningful apology is one that communicates three R's: regret, responsibility, and remedy.

A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer’s spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction.

A moment of Patience in a moment of Anger saves a thousand moments of Regret.

Anaya sensed her opportunity and stole a moment to take in what Emberswick looked like in her teens. Still an engineering town, with a heap of lumber mills to show for it. It had been systematically envisioned and built around lush, small woods and pretty, little parks, spotted with bubbling fountains. A charming place to live, with a pleasant pace of life, and the people were just as engaging.

Anaya inhaled the rich scent of soil, along with the sharp, citric smell of thriving vegetation and the sweetness of fresh dew. Her eyes drifted shut and she pricked up her ears, the gushing sound of the nearby waterfalls enveloping her.

And he had a theory about fear. It was all about regret. If you make what you want out of life and don't bullshit yourself about your choices, then there are no regrets, and a man without regret isn't afraid of anything.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

«And in the end» said the witch to the drowning prince «You've been the one choosing the thornless path in spite of knowing where it could lead. The one who afraid of the pricking roses, plunged himself into an abyss without petals

And in the silence what followed, I reckon our eyes had some long conversation our mouths could’ve never talked through. Some long, looking talk about things gone and long since said. About cries out in the night and some long ago tangling of limbs. And about them betrayals done time and time again—by both of us—what led to me pointing the Green Man’s rifle at the man what once loved me under the Green Man’s stars.

And just like a waterfall, our actions flow. What happened is a part of the past; it'll remain there for a while before morphing into clean water.

And I watched the first man I ever kissed walk away from me forever. My heart full of nothing but regret, my brain full of nothing but reassurance that I was making the right choice, and my voice, completely void of any will to call him back.

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait might fold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.

And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.

And I know, too, that recognizing one's mistakes does not erase them.

And I want to tell you about everything but I can't because I couldn't stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I'm normal. I just really need that from you.

And maybe that's all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.

And so, Anaya's story begins with her last thought. Would I have done this if I had any option but the grave?

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.

And the General regrets the night.

And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage, this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth has taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in the aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the me who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.

And that was the thing, wasn’t it? When life rode on its highs, you wanted it to go on forever. But in the depths of the invariable dives, you’d be happy to be put out of your misery, because whatever awaited beyond this life had to be better than this shit on Earth.

And that old story about the ghost that looks like a rock comes to her now: The farther from shore you take it, the heavier it becomes, until one day it gets too heavy to bear. Faye imagines her father taking a small piece of earth with him, a memento: this farm, this family, his memory of it. This was the drowning stone from his stories. He took it to sea and took it to Iceland and took it all the way to America. And as long as he held on to it, he just kept sinking.

And then they came upon it. It was painted in the most cat-retch shade of beige you ever beheld.

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been.

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

Anger travels faster, conscience is slower! Angers goes ahead to destroy long before conscience lately arrives to regret! Don't try to keep anger just for a while... It destroys before negotiations!

Any fighter knows that regret that doesn't inform your future is wasted emotion. If you lose and dwell on the missed opportunity rather than the chances to come, you're finished.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

Any anger I feel vanishes. What is left cannot be described. It is guilt piled onto emptiness and set afire.

A part of me knew... from the moment I saw her; her death would have been one wound too many that day.

A red carpet and red rope stanchion sets demarcated a runway and seating areas. Silhouettes of prominent action heroes posing on silver and gold LED blocks illuminated the whole area. Black silk covered tables and chairs, with centerpieces of colossal martini glasses containing glowing ice cubes.

A perpetrator may have hurt someone for a few minutes of his/her life and may even regret it, but the survivor lives with the pain, triggers, shame and fear for a lifetime.

A redeemed woman leaves regrets behind.

...aren't the memories worth something? Does it all have to be swept under the rug of regret?

Are you all right? With your Guild, I mean?" Alain considered the question. "They suspect me of being attracted to a Mechanic. They are right, but so far lack proof. They do not suspect that I love you, or who you are, but I have no doubt of what they will do if they discover either of those things." "Oh, blazes." Mari lowered her head to rest her brow against the cool stone of the fortification. "I have ruined your life." "You have given me back my life.

Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher? No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.

Are guilt and regret not messages from inside of us, letting us know that our moral compasses have been recalibrated and are pointing in the right direction?

As he left Yata’s home that morning, he knew that a part of his life was complete and that whatever path he chose, he would experience the ache of unfulfilled dreams. For a moment he allowed himself to feel regret at the thought of never building a cottage by the river with Trevanion. Or living the life of a simple farmer connected to the earth. Or traveling his kingdom, satisfying the nomad he had become. To be Finnikin of the Rock and the Monts and the River and the Flatlands and the Forest. To be none of those at all. Yet he also knew that to lose her to another man would be a slow torture every day for the rest of his life.

As a man gets older, his regrets changes. Especially when he's gotten into the Scotch.

As I let it out, layer by layer, Dr. Driscoll helped with the bumps and valleys. He knew just how much to draw out of me and how much I could handle. He is such an expert in his profession. He told me that the guilt I was feeling was not guilt, but regret. Guilt is a good thing. It is a mechanism by which we shouldn't make the same mistake twice. If you do something questionable, then the next chance you get to do it, guilt should stop you. I had no guilt. I had regrets, many regrets, but no guilt. It took some convincing, but he prevailed. There was always a nagging in my head, that if only I had had the guts to kill Neary myself, it would have stopped him from harming others, but that was not to be as a small boy. It does hurt that, maybe, just maybe, if I had carried out one of my many plans to kill him and myself then I could have saved victims younger than I. As victims come forward from almost all the churches where he served—and some are twenty—five plus years my junior—I feel that they would have been spared, if only I hadn't chickened out as a boy. Therein lies the answer; I was a little boy, a ten—year—old boy. Other victims of Neary were as young as six.

As when we can recall so vividly We almost touch, Or think of all the gestures that we failed To make.