“To a poet nothing can be useless.”
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 10
“Regret is useless since it can achieve nothing.”
Book 4, “Doomed Lord’s Passing,” Chapter 1 “When the Sun Stopped” (p. 577)
The Elric Cycle, Stormbringer (1965)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Regret is useless since it can achieve nothing." by Michael Moorcock?
Michael Moorcock 224
English writer, editor, critic 1939Related quotes
“Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.”
Marlon Brando
(1924–2004) American screen and stage actor
Henri Barbusse
(1873–1935) French novelist
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is — and which yet, for one day, is no longer!
“There's nothing useless to a man of sense.”
Jean De La Fontaine
(1621–1695) French poet, fabulist and writer.
Il n'est rien d'inutile aux personnes de sens.
Book V (1668), fable 19.
Fables (1668–1679)
“Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
(1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician
On Machiavelli (1827)
“To say anything was useless, to say nothing was cowardly.”
Bernard Cornwell
(1944) British writer
Captain Richard Sharpe, in response to the suggestion of whipping sixty men, p. 151
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Eagle (1981)
Context: To say anything was useless, to say nothing was cowardly. "I think it a bad idea, Sir."
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.”
Helen Keller
book
Optimism
Optimism (1903)
Variant: Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement
Theodore Roosevelt
(1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1900s, A Square Deal (1903)
Context: Among ourselves we differ in many qualities of body, head, and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as well as physically. But each of us has the right to ask that he shall be protected from wrong-doing as he does his work and carries his burden through life. No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing; and this is a prize open to every man, for there can be no better worth doing than that done to keep in health and comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately dependent upon the husband, the father, or the son. There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler, for the man or the woman whose object it is throughout life to shirk the duties which life ought to bring. Life can mean nothing worth meaning, unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, the achievement of results worth achieving.