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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (8,075)
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- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,167)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,898)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Cicero, Marcus Tullius • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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- 24-Feb-21 - "Mobs and Education," Speech, Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston (16 Dec 1860) | WIST on “The Boston Mob,” speech, Antislavery Meeting, Boston (21 Oct 1855).
- 22-Feb-21 - Letter (1860) | WIST on Areopagitica: a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644).
- 21-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Memoirs of William Miller, quoted in Life (2 May 1955).
- 21-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Letter, unsent (1927).
- 20-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Remark (Winter 1927).
- 13-Feb-21 - tweet: the case of anti-cytokine therapy for Covid-19 – Med-stat.info on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917).
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Quotations about regret
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
The sad truth is that the truth is sad.
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of Grief the blunder of a life.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) English politician and author
Vivian Grey, Book 6, ch. 7 (1826)
(Source)
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) American writer
“Inventory,” Life (11 Nov 1926)
(Source)
Reprinted in Enough Rope (1926).
There are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearances only.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) English novelist, satirist, scholar
Erewhon, ch. 3 “Up the River” (1872)
(Source)
Apologies rebuild the bridge that gets severed when we hurt someone else, either intentionally or by accident. Apologies don’t require us to grovel or wallow in guilt. We simply acknowledge that our actions were insensitive, unkind, or harmful and say we are sorry.
Charlotte Kasl (contemp.) American psychologist and author
If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path (1999)
(Source)
An apology is the superglue of life! It can repair just about anything.
Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past — the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive.
Tryon Edwards (1809-1894) American theologian, writer, lexicographer
A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908)
(Source)
Often wrongly quoted, "... best apologies for bad actions in the past."
The essence of good manners consists in making it clear that one has no wish to hurt. When it is clearly necessary to hurt, it must be done in such a way as to make it evident that the necessity is felt to be regrettable.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
“Good Manners and Hypocrisy,” New York American (14 Dec 1934)
(Source)
Virtue extends our days: he lives two lives who relives his past with pleasure.
[Ampliat aetatis spatium sibi vir bonus. Hoc est
Vivere bis vita posse priore frui.]Martial (AD c.39-c.103) Spanish Roman poet, satirist, epigrammatist [Marcus Valerius Martialis]
Epigrams [Epigrammata], Book 10, epigram 23
Alt trans.:
- "The good man prolongs his life; to be able to enjoy one's past life is to live twice." [Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)]
- "For he lives twice who can at once employ / The present well, and e'en the past enjoy." [Pope, Imitation of Martial]
- "A good man lengthens his term of existence; to be able to enjoy our past life is to live twice." [tr. Bohn (1871)]
- "The good man broadens for himself the span of his years: to be able to enjoy the life you have spent, is to live it twice." [tr. Nisbet (2015)]
- "A good man widens for himself his age's span; he lives twice who can find delight in life bygone." [tr. Ker (1919)]
BUNTY: It’s such fun, being reminded of things.
NICKY: And such agony, too.
To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.Omar Khayyám (1048-1123) Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer
Rubáiyát, 71 [tr. FitzGerald]
A reference to Daniel 5 in the Bible.
Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) British novelist, poet [pseud. Ellis Bell]
Wuthering Heights, ch. 7 (1847) [Nelly Dean]
(Source)
The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today may have wished to live had he waited a week.
Don’t commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later.
Art Buchwald (1925-2007) American humorist, columnist
Leaving Home (1995)
A personal mantra Buchwald used to combat his intermittent depression. Possibly borrowed from Voltaire.
You couldn’t get hold of the things you’d done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.
Most men make use of the first part of their life to render the last part miserable.
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of each day and hour.
But the greatest gift in the power of loneliness to bestow is the realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or much, life is now — this day — this hour — and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have.
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
If you derive pleasure from the good which you have performed and you grieve for the evil which you have committed, you are a true believer.
BRUTUS: The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power.
When thinking about life, remember this: no amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish poet and dramatist
“Vacillation,” st. 4 (1932), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
(Source)
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; It is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
You always said people don’t do what they believe in,
they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent.
That what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ch. 4 (1759)
(Source)
Like the greedy merchants of bazaars, if we get out of life what we ask for, we are unhappy for not having asked for more.
I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
SID: It is not what you are; it’s what you don’t become that hurts.
I regret nothing, says arrogance; I will regret nothing, says inexperience.
Men repent speaking ten times, for once that they repent keeping silence.
James Burgh (1714-1775) British politician and writer
The Dignity of Human Nature, Sec. 5 “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Prudence in Conversation” (1754)
(Source)
There are things you can’t walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward.
A word spoken is past recalling.
It is a mortifying reflection for any man to consider what he has done with what he might have done.
Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.
Therefore, two bad habits must be forbidden, both the fear of the future and the memory of by-gone trouble; the latter no longer belongs to me, the former, not yet.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we’re not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it’s only at night — when we’re alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep — that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice.
When I had youth I had no money; now I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life. I suppose it’s the discipline I need; but it’s rather hard to love the things I do, and see them go by because duty chains me to my galley. If I ever come into port with all sails set, that will be my reward perhaps.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be — instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance — for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be — And I had known it … and I had let it slip away.
Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
What’s the good of being forgiven, if I have to promise not to do it again?
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977) American comedian [b. Julius Henry Marx]
(Attributed)
Quoted by Ever Star, "Inside TV," Greensboro Record (3 Nov 1954). Also attributed to Ambrose Bierce, Henry Ward Beecher, and Lawrence J. Peter. More research and discussion here.
If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more.