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

“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,”

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;”

“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”