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100 Regret Quotes That Will Make You Reflect on Your Life

Explore a collection of poignant regret quotes that capture the essence of hindsight and life’s valuable lessons. Delve into the wisdom of these quotes to navigate life’s decisions.

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This post is about regret quotes!

Regret is a feeling as common to human beings as joy or sadness.

Throughout our lives we add situations in which we would´ve liked to have acted differently, made decisions that should have been ruled out or lived moments that, surely, did not deserve such a sentimental load.

Regret allows us to learn more about ourselves than meets the eye. We do not have the same scale of values ​​and in the same order. What for some people is just a slip, for others it is something very serious.

The degree of regret shows us the extent to which we consider important what we have done and, therefore, what we should not repeat

Although the emotion of regret is directed towards the past, this emotion has a significant effect on our future lives. Regret is not always bad, since after having experienced regret about a choice, we can choose differently when faced with a similar choice again.

This feeling that we use to mistreat ourselves is very common, although in each person it has a different level. We use regret to punish ourselves for some wrongdoing and spiral into self-abuse.

It is a form of penance, but we have to leave it behind and take responsibility or try to repair the damage and not carry that feeling of misery all our life. The ability to recognize what is unfortunate in life emerges from maturity and contributes to one’s own maturation.

Regretting missed opportunities reminds people not to miss other current opportunities. Thus, repentance motivates people to seize the day. Let these regret quotes break the shell of your heart and help you move forward and forgive your past.

You can also share these regret quotes with all your loved ones and help them see a brighter and happier future!

In this post:

Regret Quotes About Life

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  1. ¨Oh yes, the past can hurt. But you can either run from it, or learn from it.¨ – Rafiki, The Lion King
  2. ¨Never regret anything that made you smile.¨ – Mark Twain 
  3. ¨There are no regrets in life, just lessons.¨ – Jennifer Aniston
  4. ¨Dead people receive more flowers than living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.¨ – Anne Frank
  5. ¨The only way to maintain a moderate sum of happiness in this life, is not to worry about the future or regret the past too much.¨ – Mel Gibson
  6. ¨Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can´t build on it; it´s only good for wallowing in.¨ – Katherine Mansfield 
  7. ¨When I look at my life, I realize that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgment but failures of feeling.¨ – Jeanette Winterson
  8. ¨I´d rather regret the things I´ve done, than regret the things I haven´t done.¨ – Lucille Ball
  9. ¨It´s better to have something to remember, than anything to regret.¨ – Frank Zappa 
  10. ¨So do you want to take a leap of faith, or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.¨ – Saito, Inception 
  11. ¨Let´s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.¨ – Steve Jobs
  12. ¨In the end… We only regret the chances we didn´t take, the relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make.¨ – Lewis Carroll 
  13. ¨I made decisions that I regret, and I took them as learning experiences… I’m human, not perfect, like anybody else.¨ – Queen Latifah
  14. ¨Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow.¨ –  L. Ron Hubbard 
  15. ¨I will never, ever regret the things I´ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.¨ – Jojo Moyes, Me before you
  16. ¨We crucify ourselves between two thieves; regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.¨ – Fulton Oursler 
  17. ¨Regret is the worst human emotion. If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff. I´m content.¨ – William Shatner
  18. ¨There’s no regret. You can’t regret. I mean, I’ve felt regret but I’ve also refused to allow regret to sow a seed and live in me because I don’t believe it. You feel it, it’s like guilt, it’s like jealousy, it’s like all those horrible things. You’ve just got to snip them and get them out, because they’re no good.¨ – Jude Law
  19. ¨Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.¨ – Leonardo da Vinci
  20. ¨If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.¨ – Jim Carrey

Regret Quotes About Relationships

  1. ¨Hurting people you love is the heaviest kind of regret.¨ – Charlotte Eriksson
  2. ¨Not all the relationships deserve loving and all the lies worth to regret.¨- M. F Moonzajer
  3. ¨Speak when you´re angry, and you´ll make the best speech you´ll ever regret.¨ – Dr. Laurence J. Peter 
  4. ¨The greatest step towards a life of simplicity is to learn to let go.¨- Steve Maraboli
  5. ¨Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.¨ – Charles Dickens 
  6. ¨Don´t be discouraged, every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.¨ – Gillian Flynn
  7.  ¨When you end up happily married, even the failed relationships have worked beautifully to get you there.¨ – Julia Roberts
  8. ¨Relationships end, but they don’t end your life. But people do often spend more time finding out about failed relationships than finding successful ones.¨ – Steve Martin
  9. ¨Most people seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.¨ – Neil Strauss
  10. ¨You’re not my favorite mistake. You’re just a simple regret. I thought I knew who you were, but watch how fast and watch how well I forget.¨ – Shotgun Serenade, The Juliana Theory 
  11. ¨Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren´t accompanied by regret. ¨ – Laura Kasischke
  12. ¨I don´t regret loving you, maybe I regret loving the right one and failing to receive.¨ – Priyanka Rajpurohit 
  13. ¨Never regret anything you´ve done with a sincere affection; nothing is lost that is born of the heart.¨ – Basil Rathbone
  14. ¨Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so. ¨- Ray Stannard Baker
  15. ¨I don´t regret my past, I just regret the time I´ve wasted on the wrong people.¨ – Wiz Khalifa
  16. ¨Letting go doesn´t mean that you don´t care about someone anymore. It´s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.¨ – Deborah Reber 
  17. ¨All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.¨ – Havelock Ellis
  18. ¨If your love was sincere, they will come back. And if they don´t, because of pride, their mind will forever egret losing true love like yours. True love is hard to find.¨ – Najwa Zebian 
  19.  ¨I realize there´s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they´re experts at letting things go.¨ – Jeffrey Mc Daniel
  20. ¨The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.¨ – Sylvia Plath

Related: 100 Pain Quotes That Will Heal And Strengthen Your Soul

Regret Quotes About Love

  1. ¨The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.¨ – Gabriel García Marquez
  2. ¨Love feels like sorrow, sounds like sadness… tastes like regret.¨ – Ranata Suzuki
  3. ¨The regret of my life is that I have not said ´I love you´ often enough.¨ – Yoko Ono
  4. ¨You loved me as hard as you knew how. I´d give anything to go back and love you better.¨ – Joe Hill
  5. ¨Worry makes you weaker, regret makes you sadder, hate makes you angrier, but hope makes you stronger, and love makes you happier.¨ – Matshona Dhliwayo
  6. ¨Never regret. If it´s good, it´s wonderful. If it´s bad, it´s experience.¨ – Victoria Holt
  7. ¨If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world. ¨ Mercedes Lackey
  8. ¨Tell her you love her. You´ve got nothing to lose and you´ll always regret it if you don´t.¨ – Daniel, Love Actually
  9. ¨At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning ne more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.¨ – Barbara Bush
  10. ¨Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!¨ – John Greenleaf Whittier
  11. ¨The only thing people regret is that they didn´t live boldly enough, that they didn´t invest enough heart, didn´t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.¨ – Ted Hughes
  12. ¨Life is short. Be silly. Have fun. Love the people who treat you right, forget the ones who don´t. Regret nothing. Believe everything happens for a purpose… and seek that purpose!¨ – Karen Salmansohn
  13. ¨It´s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.¨ – Alfred Lord Tennyson
  14. ¨I don´t want to die with regrets. I like living experiencing and feeling the whole lot.¨ – Nick Love
  15. ¨Regret is the only wound the soul does not recover from.¨ – Sarah Ban Breathnach
  16. ¨I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end.¨- Drew Barrymore
  17. ¨Accept everything about yourself, I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end, no apologies, no regrets.¨- Henry A. Kissinger
  18. ¨If we fail to give our time to those we love, one day we will live to regret it.¨ – Dieter F Uchtdorf
  19. ¨I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us.¨ – Loren Eiseley
  20. ¨Forever is a long time and time has a way of changing things.¨ – Walt Disney

Related: 130 Most Amazing Motivational Study Quotes

Regret Quotes About Endings

  1. ¨You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake. This is your life, and it´s ending one minute at a time.¨ – Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
  2. ¨I regret the ending of our friendship and hope one day before we die, we´ll make peace with each other. No rush.¨ – Paul Simon
  3. ¨Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?¨ – Janet Fitch 
  4. ¨All endings are also beginnings. We just don´t know it at the time.¨- Mitch Albom 
  5. ¨Celebrate endings, for they precede new beginnings.¨ – Jonathan Lockwood Huie 
  6. ¨And in real life endings aren´t always neat, whether they´re happy endings, or whether they´re sad endings.¨ – Stephen King
  7. ¨We all choose, Kendra. In the end, we can only hope we´ve chosen wisely. Regret is a horrible monster to flee from.¨ – Emma Raveling
  8. ¨Making a big life change is pretty scary. But you know what´s even scarier? Regret.¨ – Zig Ziglar 
  9. ¨The secret to life is to have more beginnings than endings.¨ – Dave Weinbaum
  10. ¨Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.¨ – Robin Hobb
  11. ¨Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we didn´t do that is inconsolable.¨ – Sydney J. Harris
  12. ¨It is time to end a story that began in sorrow and ordeal and has ended in a deep and lasting happiness. May it be so for others.¨ – Anne McCaffrey
  13. ¨If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you close the book!¨ – Orson Welles
  14. ¨Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.¨ – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables 
  15. ¨A little misgiving in the beginning of things, means much regret in the end of them.¨ – Amelia Barr
  16. ¨In the planning stage of a book, don´t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.¨ – Rose Tremain
  17. ¨There is no real ending. It´s just the place where you stop the story.¨ – Frank Herbert 
  18. ¨The end is the beginning of all things, suppressed and hidden, awaiting to be released through the rhythm of pain and pleasure.¨ – Jiddu Krishnamurti
  19. ¨The bad news is time flies; the good news is you´re the pilot.¨ – Michael Altshuler 
  20. ¨Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don´t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.¨ – Paulo Coelho

Related: 120 Most Inspirational & Motivational Quotes for College Students

Regret Quotes About Missed Opportunities

  1. ¨Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.¨ – H. Jackson Brown
  2. ¨Most people miss great opportunities, because of their misperception of time. Don´t wait! The time will never be just right.¨ – Stephen C. Hogan 
  3. ¨Don´t live in regret over missed opportunities, for if you do, you will miss even more.¨ – Charbel Tadros
  4. ¨Every opportunity missed is an opportunity for regret.¨ – Karl Kloppenborg
  5. ¨Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.¨ – F. Scott Fitzgerald 
  6. ¨Opportunity is a bird that never perches.¨ – Claude MacDonald
  7. ¨You miss 100% of the shots you don´t make.¨ – Wayne Gretzky 
  8. ¨How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.¨ – Paulo Coelho 
  9. ¨Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.¨ – William Arthur Ward 
  10. ¨Opportunity is missed by people because It is dressed in overalls and looks like work.¨ – Thomas Edison 
  11. ¨Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.¨ – Napoleon Hill
  12. ¨Something that is loved, is never lost.¨ – Toni Morrison
  13. ¨If you work on something long enough you will find it, even if you are lost for a while, you will find it.¨ – Professor Bomba, Epic
  14. ¨Don´t be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.¨ – Lily Tomlin
  15. ¨Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.¨ – I M Pei 
  16. ¨Youth is a period of missed opportunities.¨ – Cyril Connolly 
  17. ¨What would be awful would be to die and look back miserably, seeing only the bad things, the opportunities missed, or what could have been.¨ – Audrey Hepburn
  18. ¨We´ve all got a black book of missed opportunities.¨ – Jim Broadbent
  19. ¨Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.¨ – Jodi Picoult
  20. ¨It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default. ¨ – J.K. Rowling

Final Thoughts

Life is like a labyrinth; you have to go through many wrong passages to find the exit; it can be easier for some people, and it can be harder for others.

Some people give up, but what they don´t understand is that, in the end, if you don´t give up and keep trying, you will find the exit. Because it doesn´t matter if it´s not the exit you planned at the start, you are getting exactly where you need to be, so there is no need to regret your past choices, because they made you who you are today.

Every morning we are born again, so you can make this feeling the torment of your existence, or you can remember these regret quotes throughout your life and decide to let go of what no longer serves you in order to live in peace and harmony with yourself. 

There is no time in life for regret unless it is to improve you as a person, so keep your head up, maintain a positive attitude towards the future that is coming, and make peace with your old self, which has gone through a lot to take you exactly where you needed to be.

So, keep that beautiful smile on your face and don´t let the choices of the past consume you and trap you in a cage without an exit.

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