Top 18 Regretful Quotes & Sayings

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

The historical relationship between Christians and Jews for most of the two thousand years of Christianity has not been good and it's been mostly persecution by Christians of Jews - not all the time, not every place, but mostly it's been that. I think that's just a terribly regretful thing. I don't see it anywhere in the Scriptures that I read, that Christians are to persecute Jews. I think it's been quite damaging. I think it's been a bad witness.

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

I can remember watching 'Lord of the Rings' and being truly regretful that I wasn't a being in that world.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

I am thrilled. I love movies. I don't have those nagging, regretful feelings about either of them, it is a miracle.

Ragnor looked very regretful about all the choices that had led him to his being in this place and especially in this company

I'm not regretful about dropping acid, but I could have stopped it a little sooner.

[ Rajiv Gandhi] was very reflective and rueful and regretful about the fact that his children's education...He wanted them to get educated outside of India, but he said to me the only place that he found where they would be safe was in Russia, and he didn't really want them to be educated there! So, I said, "Well, send them to Australia. I'll look after them." And my security bloke went absolutely bloody bananas, and I said, "We'll look after them." But, in the end, he didn't send them.

The end we know not; but we wander on, Down the regretful wilderness of time.

My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.

When Donald Trump's term is over, I think, the debasing of the American nation - the constant non-truth-telling, the name-calling - the debasement of our nation will be what he will be remembered most for. And that's regretful, and it affects young people. We have young people who for the fist time are watching a President stating absolute non-truths, non-stop, personalizing things in the way that he does. And it's very sad for our nation.

Pride is not a word or sentiment I can ascribe to anything I have done or do. As far as regret, it is a luxury I can not afford. Anything I did, that was bad or wrong or regretful, I stand accused, I am guilty and I'm ready to serve my time.

I try not to look back on my life and be regretful.

As for those who protest that I am robbing people of the great comfort and consolation they gain from Christianity, I can only say that Christianity includes hell, eternal torture for the vast majority of humanity, for most of your relatives and friends. . . . If I could feel that I had robbed anybody of his faith in hell, I should not be ashamed or regretful.

And to have spent the night sleeping and awoken regretful, is better than to have spent the night standing (in prayer) and awaken impressed with oneself!

There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still still still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence--not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping [...].

I haven't run across anyone in Georgia who is not regretful and repentant of man's inhumanity when you talk about owning one another.