- The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. Gabriel García Márquez
- The correlation between confidence and future regret is incredibly high. Morgan Housel
- “No such thing as time travel, he’d rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to do what you’re happy to live with.” ― Richard K. Morgan, Thirteen
- “In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people’s expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.” ― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
- “The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
- Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.” ― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- “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 was love. The problems, the divorces, the sadness… those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny pieces.” ― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
- Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Eckhart Tolle (See also: forgiveness quotes)
- Death may be close at hand; death may be far off. Transcend death with no-thought, no-idea. Do what you need to do, with no regret. Awa Kenzô
- “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?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?” ― Dan Simmons, Drood
- “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!” ― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair
- Regret is worse than embarrassment. What exists beats what doesn’t. Thibaut
- The wiser you get the more absorbed you are in the moment. Fools live in the future. The wise live now. Maxime Lagacé
- You can always find a “good reason” to put off what needs to be done. Time will turn excuses into regrets. @TheStoicEmperor
- The greatest fault in life is that it is always unfinished, that something is being postponed. Seneca
- The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. Mary Oliver
- “How to win in life:1 work hard 2 complain less 3 listen more 4 try, learn, grow5 don’t let people tell you it cant be done6 make no excuses” ― Germany Kent
- “For of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: “It might have been!” ― John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller
- On your deathbed, you won’t wish you had more twitter followers, an extra zero in your bank account, or were the President. Instead, you’ll be thinking about the people that mattered and whether you were there for them. It’s not too late. Change the path, change the outcome. Shane Parrish
- There are no regrets in life, just lessons. Jennifer Aniston
- Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! Fernando Pessoa
- “You were a fish in an aquarium. You went swimming in free waters with someone who turned out to be a shark, You are back in aquarium but now water is red because of your wounds. Only parasites will grow in it.Change your perspective towards your past. Accept that the shark gave you courage. Now all you need is the knowledge of self. Then you will become a swan swimming in the eternally peaceful lake.” ― Shunya
- When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. Alexander Graham Bell
- “When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything – that is the definition of conviction.” ― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
- The greatest freedoms are freedom from regret, freedom from fear, freedom from anxiety, and freedom from sorrow. Thich Nhat Hanh
- “Liam, soon-to-be-fucking-dead, Callahan was walking down the stairs—my fucking stairs—with his sex hair high and his green eyes sharper than razor blades. He was beautiful, and I almost regretted the fact that I would have to put a bullet in his head and then smash it through a fucking wall.-Melody G.” ― J.J. McAvoy, Ruthless People
- The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us. Ryan Holiday (Stillness is the Key, Amazon book)
- “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.” ― Kouta Hirano
- Your higher self never looks back. Everything valuable is in the now. Andy Wang