“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
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Sydney Smith 68
English writer and clergyman 1771–1845Related quotes
“It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed. It is the things we do not.”
CMU Graduation speech (2008)
Context: It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed. It is the things we do not. I assure you I've done a lot of really stupid things, and none of them bother me. All the mistakes, and all the dopey things, and all the times I was embarrassed — they don't matter. What matters is that I can kind of look back and say: Pretty much any time I got chance to do something cool I tried to grab for it — and that's where my solace comes from.
“One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don't do in life.”
Source: Firefly Lane
“I…regret…what I did. It was wrong. Very wrong. But regret is meaningless.”
Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 16 “From the Depths to the Heights” (watercolor) (p. 283)
"The Historians Call Up Pain", first collected in Once Bitten, Twice Bitten (1961); cited from Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (eds.) A Group Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 83.
“The hardest thing I ever did was keep my temper at that time.”
A comment to a personal friend, about Joseph McCarthy's attacks upon his loyalty (which went so far as to call him a "traitor"), as quoted by Alistair Cooke, in Letter from America : General Marshall (16 October 1959), published in Memories of the Great and the Good (1999)
