For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: It might have been. [ Whittier ]
It is folly to shiver over last year's snow. [ Whately ]
There is an aching that is worse than any pain. [ George MacDonald ]
Regrets over the past should chasten the future. [ James Ellis ]
Hopes and regrets are the sweetest links of existence. [ L. E. Landon ]
The fewer the thoughtless words spoken, the less regret.
One of the sweetest pleasures of a woman is to cause regret. [ Gavarni ]
Hope, folding her wings, looked backward, and became regret. [ Mrs. Marian Lewes Cross (pen name George Eliot) ]
Let us not burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone. [ William Shakespeare ]
I regret often that I have spoken, never that I have been silent. [ Publius Syrus ]
The past gives us regret, the present sorrow, and the future fear. [ Mme. de Lambert ]
I regret not death. I am going to meet my friends in another world. [ Ariosto ]
Pleasures are sins: we regret to offend God; but, then, pleasures please us. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
Something will be gathered from the tablets of the most faultless day for regrets. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
I shall leave the world without regret, for it hardly contains a single good listener. [ Fontenelle ]
Take any subject of sorrowful regret, and see with how much pleasure it is associated. [ Dickens ]
For life in general, there is but one decree: youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. [ Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) ]
We lose some friends for whom we regret more than we grieve; and others for whom we grieve, yet do not regret. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Women call repentance the sweet remembrance of their faults, and the bitter regret of their inability to recommence them. [ Beaumanoir ]
Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Time is given us that we may take care for eternity; and eternity will not be too long to regret the loss of our time if we have misspent it. [ Fenelon ]
Live on what you have; live if you can on less; do not borrow either for vanity or pleasure--the vanity will end in shame, and the pleasure in regret. [ Johnson ]
Love is a bird of passage that women await with curiosity in youth, retain with pleasure in maturer years, and allow to escape with regret when old age creeps upon them. [ A. Ricard ]
Bed is a bundle of paradoxes; we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; and we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. [ Colton ]
One must always regret that law of growth which renders necessary that kittens should spoil into demure cats, and bright, joyous school-girls develop into the spiritless, crystallized beings denominated young ladies. [ Abba Goold Woolson ]
A woman whose great beauty eclipses all others is seen with as many different eyes as there are people who look at her. Pretty women gaze with envy, homely women with spite, old men with regret, young men with transport. [ D'Argens ]
How many who, after having achieved fame and fortune, recall with regret the time when - ascending the hills of life in the sun of their twentieth year - they had nothing but courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the treasure of the poor! [ H. Murger ]
Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]