“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

Source: The Remains of the Day

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite a…" by Kazuo Ishiguro?
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro 76
Japanese-born British author 1954

Related quotes

L. Frank Baum photo
Cheryl Strayed photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“If we wish to be true to ourselves, — if we wish to benefit our fellow-men — if we wish to live honorable lives — we will give to every other human being every right that we claim for ourselves.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: Gentlemen, you can never make me believe — no statute can ever convince me, that there is any infinite Being in this universe who hates an honest man. It is impossible to satisfy me that there is any God, or can be any God, who holds in abhorrence a soul that has the courage to express his thought. Neither can the whole world convince me that any man should be punished, either in this world or in the next, for being candid with his fellow-men. If you send men to the penitentiary for speaking their thoughts, for endeavoring to enlighten their fellows, then the penitentiary will become a place of honor, and the victim will step from it — not stained, not disgraced, but clad in robes of glory.
Let us take one more step.
What is holy, what is sacred? I reply that human happiness is holy, human rights are holy. The body and soul of man — these are sacred. The liberty of man is of far more importance than any book; the rights of man, more sacred than any religion — than any Scriptures, whether inspired or not.
What we want is the truth, and does any one suppose that all of the truth is confined in one book — that the mysteries of the whole world are explained by one volume?
All that is — all that conveys information to man — all that has been produced by the past — all that now exists — should be considered by an intelligent man. All the known truths of this world — all the philosophy, all the poems, all the pictures, all the statues, all the entrancing music — the prattle of babes, the lullaby of mothers, the words of honest men, the trumpet calls to duty — all these make up the bible of the world — everything that is noble and true and free, you will find in this great book.
If we wish to be true to ourselves, — if we wish to benefit our fellow-men — if we wish to live honorable lives — we will give to every other human being every right that we claim for ourselves.

Lucy Stone photo

“It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1891); as quoted in The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898) by Ida Husted Harper.

“We have to serve ourselves for many years before we gain our own confidence.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 104

Matthew Arnold photo

“It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" Growing Old" (1867), st. 7

Nicholas Sparks photo
William McDonough photo

“If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.”

William McDonough (1951) American architect

"William McDonough: Godfather of Green", WNYC Studio 360 (18 March 2008) http://www.studio360.org/2011/apr/22/william-mcdonough-godfather-green/

Related topics