Regret and Guilt

I hold it true, what’re befall feel it, when I sorrow most ‘is better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Than never to have loved at all.

’Tis better to have loved and lost

 

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

O mother what have I left out O mother what have I forgotten

Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

The tragedy of life is not so much what we suffer, but rather what we miss.

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.

Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope.

Had I but served my God with half the zeal

 

If you trap the moment before it’s ripe, The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.

My mistakes are my life.

[ On the Iran-Contra scandal :] Clearly, mistakes were made.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

If, of all words of tongue and pen,

What one refuses in a minute No eternity will return.

 

The wiser mind mourns less for what Age takes away, than what it leaves behind.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.

What have you done, you there Weeping without cease, Tell me, yes you, what have you done With all your youth? 3