40 Famous Regret Quotes That Won’t Let Regret Get You Down

regret quotes

What is the saying about regret and why do we regret?

Most times we are too concerned with what was and what went wrong that we could be dragged into a whole lot of negative thinking that will impede us from enjoying the now and begin to feel hopeless and helpless in life.

Mistakes lead to regrets when not treated with a positive attitude but however, mistakes prove we are all humans and no one is above making a mistake.

According to Albert Einstien and I quote, “anyone who has not made a mistake has never tried anything new.” When things go wrong, whether, in business or our relationship life, we don’t have to take it to be the end of the world. The list of things that can make us sad and have deep regrets are endless. It could be a marriage that failed, the death of a loved one, disappointment, or failure in building a career.

The most intriguing thing is that, whether you are searching for regret quotes for him or her, or regret messages that are uplifting, you will find the following carefully selected quotes about regrets helpful.

Quotes about regrets to stay strong

  1. “A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps”― Charles Goodyear
  2. “A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”― John Barrymore
  3. “Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy – the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.” ― Eric Hoffer
  4. “Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives.”― William Throsby Bridges
  5. “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!”―John Greenleaf Whittier
  6. “Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.”―Jonathan Larson
  7. “I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.”― John Oliver Hobbes
  8. “If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.”―Mercedes Lackey
  9. “If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”– Henry David Thoreau
  1.  “In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”―Stefan Zweig
  2. “It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade
  3. “It’s not what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts.”―Oscar Levant
  4. “Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.”―Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
  5. “Let the dead Past bury its dead!”― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  6. “Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been.”―Hilary Clinton
  7. “Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”―Henry David Thoreau
  8. “Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.”―  Fulton Oursler
  9. “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”―Arthur Miller
  10. “Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.”―Victoria Holt
  11. “Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.”―Ann Landers
  1. “Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.”―George Halas
  2. “Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was.”―John O’Donohue
  3. “One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.”―Agatha Christie
  4. “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”― Sydney J. Harris
  5.  “Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can’t build on it – it’s only good for wallowing in.”―Katherine Mansfield
  6. “Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit. Rafael Sabatini
  7. “Regrets are idle, yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.”―  Charles Dudley Warner
  8.  “Something you need most might be something you turn away from, something you turn away from might be something you regret, and something you regret, in the end, might cost you the one chance you ever had.”―Brian Judge
  9. “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”―Harriet Beecher Stowe
  10. “The principles of living greatly include the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and trial with humility.”― Thomas S. Monson
  11. “The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart’s history.”― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret, and other stories
  1. “There’s always a failure. And there’s always a disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.”― Michael J. Fox
  2. “There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead
  3. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”―  Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You
  4. “We have to let go of all blame, all attacking, all judging, to free our inner selves to attract what we say we want.”―Joe Vitale
  5.  “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.”― Jim Rohn
  6. “We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.”―Lucy Maud Montgomery
  7. “When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”―Alexander Graham Bell
  8. “When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”― Paulo Coelho, Brida
  9. “You really didn’t see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn’t it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.” ― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

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