Best Regret Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!”

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”

“i dont love you... like i loved you... yesterday.”

“so here i sit. a sum of the parts. about a third way down this wonderful path, so to speak. and i've been thinking lately about a friendship that fell apart with time, with distance, and with the misunderstanding of youth. i'm trying not to confuse sadness with regret. not the easiest thing at times. i dont regret that certain things happened. i understand that perhaps i had a choice in the matter, or perhaps i believe in fate. probably not, but so far actions as small as the quickest glance to events as monumental as death have pushed me slowly along to right here, right now. there was no other way to get here. the meandering and erratic path was actually the straightest of lines. take away a handful of angry words, things once thought of as mistakes or regrets, and i'm suddenly a different person with a different history, a different future. that, i would regret. so here i sit. thinking about a person i once called my best friends. a man who might be full of sadness and regret, who might not give a damn, or who might, just might, remember the future and realize that's where its at.”

“الندم هو صوت الفطرة لحظة الخطأ”

“You see, Katie," Pastor Ron said, "that’s what makes faith so tough to grasp, but also makes it so wonderful. It’s all about believing in something—whether it’s God, or other people, or even yourself—when you’ve got nothing else to go on. Nothing but a little voice inside telling you it’s more than a hunch.”

“The most expensive thing I ever did was make someone feel ordinary while they were being extraordinary. Not through cruelty. Through the specific laziness of assuming that what stays will keep staying.”

“You were my love once, now you are just a lifetime regret.”

“Most damage doesn’t happen suddenly. It accumulates quietly.”

“Both times it was loneliness, and the night, and panic afterwards.”

“It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.”

“Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.”

“Well, it's true that I have been hurt in my life. Quite a bit. But it's also true that I have loved, and been loved. and that carries a weight of its own. A greater weight, in my opinion. It's like that pie chart we talked about earlier. in the end, I'll look back on my life and see that the greatest piece of it”

“Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.”

“How fervently I long”

“All you can do is regret. Regret ever playing hope’s game in the first place. Promise yourself that you will never fall into that trap again.”

“It was hopeless to regret; instead, he made a pact with Regret: “You will lead me back to Hope, and nowhere else.”

“Sister - if all this is true, what could I do or undo?”

“Live to start your stupid ideas, and start to live a life without regret--a life filled with meaning, freedom, happiness, fun, authenticity, and influence.”

“Happiness changes the way you see the world.”

“Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.”

“Sometimes I wish life was written pencil so we could erase it and write it all over again.”

“The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.”

“Don't show a friend your gift, or your bag of money if you still want to maintain your relationship, but if nay, go on, and all you'll see is hate and jealousy, and you'll fight with him in the street like a dog and all you'll feel is regret.”

“If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.”

“I could kill you a thousand times over Abraham, but we would never be even. You took everything I had.”

“There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.”

“Dear as remembered kisses after death,”

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?”

“It's unfair.”

“I can just close my eyes and let myself fall into oblivion. Maybe I'll hit the exact same rocks and my blood will mingle with his and maybe there's some kind of life after death and he's waiting for me there with his hand outstretched just like mine.”

“No one is adequate to comprehending the misery of my lot! Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement: I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place. I have no Friend in the world, and from the restlessness of my destiny I never can acquire one. Fain would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast: The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal upon me, and all his Creatures respect this fatal mark!”

“We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.”

“How I wish I was like the water,”

“The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.”

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”

“To make peace with regrets is the beginning of life.”

“You know what adulthood is? It's making choices. And if you make the wrong one - there's no going back.”

“The real losers are those who never try / Never dare to attempt what they desire”

“It is always better to say, to do / Since a mistake can be forgiven / A wasted chance is never recovered”

“I am forever grateful for not knowing—What would have been. WHAT WILL BE holds none of those bittersweet pangs and it is lit w joy.”

“Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.”

“Sometimes I wish life was written pencil so we could erase it and write it all over again.”

“How to win in life:”

“That was how she had felt most of her life.”

“Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined”

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,”

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,”

“..he wanted her.”

“I never told you that I love you. And I regret that, most of all.”

“Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are.”

“A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.”

“regret is mostly caused by not having”

“Good...if you've done things you aren't proud of. It means you have a conscience.”

“Do not feel sad for your tears as rocks never regret the waterfalls”

“Men didn't have any idea about regret”

“Mr. Frimpong is the oldest person from church. That's when I knew why he sings louder than anybody else: it's because he's been waiting the longest for God to answer. He thinks God has forgotten him. I only knew it then. Then I loved him but it was too late to go back.”

“I need just be a bayonet, a bayonet named Diving Punishment. I wish I'd been born a storm. Or a menace. Or a single grenade. No heart, no tears, just as a terrible gale'd have been good. If [by doing this] I become that, then so be it.”

“Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!”

“A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.”

“Why should I give up revenge? On behalf of what? Moral principles? And what of the higher order of things, in which evil deeds are punished? For you, a philosopher and ethicist, an act of revenge is bad, disgraceful, unethical and illegal. But I ask: where is the punishment for evil? Who has it and grants access? The Gods, in which you do not believe? The great demiurge-creator, which you decided to replace the gods with? Or maybe the law? [...] I know what evil is afraid of. Not your ethics, Vysogota, not your preaching or moral treaties on the life of dignity. Evil is afraid of pain, mutilation, suffering and at the end of the day, death! The dog howls when it is badly wounded! Writhing on the ground and growls, watching the blood flow from its veins and arteries, seeing the bone that sticks out from a stump, watching its guts escape its open belly, feeling the cold as death is about to take them. Then and only then will evil begin to beg, 'Have mercy! I regret my sins! I'll be good, I swear! Just save me, do not let me waste away!'. Yes, hermit. That is the way to fight evil! When evil wants to harm you, inflict pain - anticipate them, it's best if evil does not expect it. But if you fail to prevent evil, if you have been hurt by evil, then avenge him! It is best when they have already forgotten, when they feel safe. Then pay them in double. In triple. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All their teeth for a tooth! Repay evil! Make it wail in pain, howling until their eyes pop from their sockets. And then, you can look under your feet and boldly declare that what is there cannot endanger anyone, cannot hurt anyone. How can someone be a danger, when they have no eyes? How can someone hurt when they have no hands? They can only wait until they bleed to death.”