I have no wish to remember everything. There are many things in most men’s lives that had better be forgotten. There is that time, many years ago, when we did not act quite as honorably, quite as uprightly, as we perhaps should have done — ­that unfortunate deviation from the path of strict probity we once committed, and in which, more unfortunate still, we were found out — ­that act of folly, of meanness, of wrong. Ah, well! we paid the penalty, suffered the maddening hours of vain remorse, the hot agony of shame, the scorn, perhaps, of those we loved. Let us forget.

Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) English writer, humorist [Jerome Klapka Jerome]

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “On Memory” (1886)
    (Source)

First published in Home Chimes (1885-09-26).