“Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.”
As quoted in Sigmund Says : And Other Psychotherapists' Quotes (2006) by Bernard Nisenholz, p. 94
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Wilhelm Stekel 17
Austrian physician and psychologist 1868–1940Related quotes
"The Emotional Factor"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Context: I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
“What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.”
Source: And the Mountains Echoed
Also quoted in "Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet" by Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian (23 January 2010) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/23/conversations-samuel-beckett-van-velde
Three Dialogues (1949)
“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)
“i find nothing more depressing than optimism.”
“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”
The Teacher of Literature (1894)
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!