C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Regret
It is folly to shiver over last year’s snow.
Regrets over the past should chasten the future.
Something will be gathered from the tablets of the most faultless day for regrets.
Hopes and regrets are the sweetest links of existence.
There is an aching that is worse than any pain.
Let us not burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that’s gone.
One of the sweetest pleasures of a woman is to cause regret.
Could not all this flesh keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell! I could have better spared a better man.
We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.
Why is it that a blessing only when it is lost cuts as deep into the heart as a sharp diamond? Why must we first weep before we can love so deeply that our hearts ache?
A wrong act followed by just regret and thoughtful caution to avoid like errors, makes a man better than he would have been it he had never fallen.
The present only is a man’s possession; the past is gone out of his hand wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it,—in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.
The business of life is to go forward; he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way, and he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow.