A collection of quotes on the topic of regret, doing, life, time.
“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.”
Variant: Correct." Kekrops sounded bitter, like he regretted his decision. "My people were the original Athenians--the gemini."
"Like your zodiac sign?" Percy asked. "I'm a Leo."
"No, stupid. "I'm a Leo. You're a Percy.
Source: The Blood of Olympus
“the more I live, the more I regret how little i know”
Os sentimentos que mais doem, as emoções que mais pungem, são os que são absurdos – a ânsia de coisas impossíveis, precisamente porque são impossíveis, a saudade do que nunca houve, o desejo do que poderia ter sido, a mágoa de não ser outro, a insatisfação da existência do mundo. Todos estes meios tons da consciencia da alma criam em nós uma paisagem dolorida, um eterno sol-pôr do que somos.
The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 196
“The lovely flowers
embarrass me.
They make me regret
I am not a bee…”
“It's better to have something to remember than anything to regret.”
Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book
“There are no regrets in life, just lessons.”
“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
Response to the closing question of whether she hadn't "indeed come to the conclusion that your conduct and the actions along with your brother and other persons in the present phase of the war should be seen as a crime against the community, but in particular against our troops fighting arduously in the east, that merits the severest sentence?" in the official examination transcripts (February 1943); Bundesarchiv Berlin, ZC 13267, Bd. 3 http://www.bpb.de/themen/5H3ZT3,3,0,Ausz%FCge_aus_den_Verh%F6rprotokollen_von_Sophie_Scholl.html#art3
“I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”
Maxim 1070
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave
“Do it or do not do it - you will regret both.”
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
Source: Either/Or
“Whoever sows good shall harvest happiness, and whoever sows evil shall harvest regret.”
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 338
Religious Wisdom
Hidden (2017)
Of the fact that she never married; quoted in Associated Press obituary.
“Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”
Source: Drums of Autumn
“I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us”
“We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.”
“I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.”
Source: Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life
In his interview with Nina Myskow for Saga magazine, July 2007
“It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth: Louis must die, so that the country may live.”
Original French: Je prononce à regret cette fatale vérité... mais Louis doit mourir, parce qu'il faut que la patrie vive.
Speech to the National Convention http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/journal_debats/an/1792/convention_1792_12_03.htm on the judgment of Louis XVI (3 December 1792)
The Book of Merlyn (1977)
"Model's Web rants pined for love" in Daily News (New York, 29 June 2009) http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/06/28/2008-06-28_models_web_rants_pined_for_love.html
Closing words from his last speech, Vanderbilt University (April 1989).
Context: In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong … and we were right! I regret nothing!
“We must live today and never regret about past, which often brings nothing but melancholy. ”
http://www.metroguiltypleasures.com/metro/coldplays-chris-martin-is-a-modern-day-shakespeare-says-jay-z/ source
“Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.”
Source: Unsourced
“Forget Regret, or life is yours to miss”
Source: Rent
As quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69
1950s
“I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”
Source: The Namesake
“I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.”
Variant: I'd rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not.
Variant: Id rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not done.
“Speak when you are angry, and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
Act 1
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)
Source: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: Rent (1996)
Variant: One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.”
"Of Power and Time"
Blue Pastures (1995)
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: Reflections: Life After the White House
Source: Little Women
The Rubaiyat (1120)
He wrote many of his novels in Hindi on his avowed words, in page=90.
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique
Attributed to Nietzsche on quotes sites and on social media, the original quotation is from An Introduction to the History of Psychology by B. R. Hergenhahn (2008, page 226) and is the author's summary of Nietzsche's ideas: "The meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting, by living dangerously. Life consists of an almost infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person (the superman) explores as many of them as possible. Religions or philosophies that teach pity, humility, submissiveness, self-contempt, self-restraint, guilt, or a sense of community are simply incorrect. [...] For Nietzsche, the good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky."
Misattributed
Carrey: 'Life Is Too Beautiful': Star Talks About Bouts With Depression And His Spirituality http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/18/60minutes/main656547.shtml 60 Minutes (21 November 2004)
Ibid., p. 250
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Se eu tivesse escrito o Rei Lear, levaria com remorsos toda a minha vida de depois. Porque essa obra é tão grande, que enormes avultam os seus defeitos, os seus monstruosos defeitos, as coisas até mínimas que estão entre certas cenas e a perfeição possível delas. Não é o sol com manchas; é uma estátua grega partida.
Pt. III, st. 35
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876)
“Nor can one easily find among many thousands a single man who considers virtue its own reward. The very glory of a good deed, if it lacks reward, affects them not; unrewarded uprightness brings them regret. Nothing but profit is prized.”
Nec facile invenias multis in milibus unum,
virtutem pretium qui putet esse sui.
ipse decor, recte facti si praemia desint,
non movet, et gratis paenitet esse probum.
nil nisi quod prodest carum est.
II, iii, 11-15; translation by Arthur Leslie Wheeler. Variant translation of gratis paenitet esse probum, in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (1980), p. 114: "It is annoying to be honest to no purpose."
Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Black Sea)
“There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.”
Ibid., p. 111
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Ah, não há saudades mais dolorosas do que as das coisas que nunca foram!
Letter to Oral Roberts in 1972, as quoted in Oral Roberts : An American Life (1985) by David Edwin Harrell, p. 310; later published in How to be a Successful Teenager (1994) by Rick Jones, Ch. 5 : The Secret About Material Things, p. 54; the accuracy of this is disputed in "The Gospel of John Lennon" in This Land Press (7 March 2011) http://thislandpress.com/03/07/2011/the-gospel-of-john-lennon/
Disputed
“All things are possible, … Except the passing of regret.”
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 20
Back To Black
Song lyrics, Back To Black (2006)
La nôtre [religion] est sans contredit la plus ridicule, la plus absurde, et la plus sanguinaire qui ait jamais infecté le monde.<p>Votre Majesté rendra un service éternel au genre humain en détruisant cette infâme superstition, je ne dis pas chez la canaille, qui n’est pas digne d’être éclairée, et à laquelle tous les jougs sont propres; je dis chez les honnêtes gens, chez les hommes qui pensent, chez ceux qui veulent penser... Je ne m’afflige de toucher à la mort que par mon profond regret de ne vous pas seconder dans cette noble entreprise, la plus belle et la plus respectable qui puisse signaler l’esprit humain.
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 156 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 5 January 1767 http://perso.orange.fr/dboudin/VOLTAIRE/45/1767/6651.html
Often misquoted as "Christianity is...", while in the context, Voltaire was referring specifically to Catholicism.
Citas
Quote in his letter to Evan Charteris, June 21, 1926; as cited in: Levine, Steven Z. " Monet's Series: Repetition, Obsession http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/778519." October (1986): 65-75.
1920 - 1926
Act 4 http://books.google.com/books?id=YI8iwzZhl6AC&q=%22what+the+hell+was+it+I+wanted+to+buy+I+wonder+that+was+worth+well+no+matter+it's+a+late+day+for+regrets%22&pg=PT133#v=onepage
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Interview in The Guardian, 25 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/25/broadcasting.bigbrother
Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. XI : The Natural Resources of the Nation, p. 386
One of two draft letters (25 July, 1938) written for Stanley Unwin to select as a response to his German publishers inquiry about his ancestry. The other letter refused to answer altogether on his ancestry; since the quoted letter persists, it seems that the other letter was sent.
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)
“I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.”
Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February 2008)
Letter to Walter Ulbricht, January 7, 1964. Russell would later write, in his autobiography: "The abduction and imprisonment by the East Germans of Brandt, who had survived Hitler's concentration camps, seemed to me so inhuman that I was obliged to return to the East German Government the Carl von Ossietzky medal which it had awarded me. I was impressed by the speed with which Brandt was soon released".
1960s
“I have no regrets except that I wasn't up to keep Randy (Rhoads) from getting on that plane.”
Guitar World Issue 37, 2000.
