“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'”
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1856 · American poet and abolitionist
Chapter 4
On Regret
“We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret.”
Adelaide Anne Procter, 1859 · English poet, on the life we let slip past
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.”
Omar Khayyam, 1120 · Persian astronomer and poet
Pooling eleven studies of what people regret, researchers found the six most common domains in order: education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure.
Neal Roese and Amy Summerville, 2005 · psychologists who mapped the landscape of regret
Regret clusters where opportunity is greatest. The door that stayed ajar hurts more than the one that was always shut.
Neal Roese and Amy Summerville, 2005 · psychologists studying the structure of regret
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1854 · American naturalist, at Walden Pond
“Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.”
Ecclesiastes, c. 300 BC · Hebrew wisdom literature
Asked what they would do differently, the oldest Americans interviewed by the Cornell Legacy Project returned again and again to the same answer: they would have spent far less of their lives worrying.
Karl Pillemer, 2011 · Cornell gerontologist, from interviews with more than a thousand of the oldest Americans
“Time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Stoic philosopher writing to his friend Lucilius
“Gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Stoic philosopher of the Roman court
“Can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey?”
Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman statesman on misplaced late-life hoarding
“No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been.”
Adelaide Anne Procter, 1859 · English poet, answering her own lament
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