Quotes about Regret

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were.

I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.

We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.

How sad it is! murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine.

Every Saint has a past. Every Sinner, has a future.

I often think if I had known these things sooner, how different my business would be today.

"King David was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: 'O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you — O Absalom: my son, my son!'"