Remorse Quotes

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword”
― Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

“One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. [...] True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

“Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can't remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Regret and remorse” is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( “Island of regret. Island of remorse” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (“Into a new life”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Puck swung the cannon around in anger. The nozzle spun and hit Sabrina in the chest. The force was so pawerful she was knocked right off the platform and fell backward off the tower. She saw sky above her and felt the wind in her hair. How ironic, she thought, as she fell to her certain death, that at that moment she would have given anything to be a giant goose again.
Air rushed past Sabrina's ears and suddenly she felt her back tingling again. A moment later she was hanging upside down, inches from the ground. She looked up to find her savior, only to find that her her wasn't a person but a long, furry tail sticking out of the back of her pants. It was wrapped around a beam in the tower a kept her swinging there like a monkey.
Puck floated down to her, his wings flapping softly enough to allow him to hover.
"I bet you think this is hilarious. Look what you did to me with your stupid pranks. I have a tail!" she raged.
Puck's face was trembling. "I'm sorry."
"What?" Sabrina said blankly.
"I almost killed you. I'm sorry, Sabrina," he said, rubbing his eyes on his filthy hoodie. He lifted her off the tower and set her on the ground.
"Since when do you care?" Sabrina said, still stunned by the boy's apology.”
― Michael Buckley, The Everafter War

“When we cannot share our values any longer and our incipient intentions have become blurry, common understanding may turn into irredeemable misunderstanding. If the spirit of common perspectives and commitments has irreversibly been broken, we might patently drift down into suspicion, remorse or regret. As such, shared initiatives ought to be reasoned and well thought-out to avoid ‘understanding’ becoming ‘misunderstanding’ and ‘hope’ breaking down into ‘heartbreak’. ("The unbreakable code " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Everyone may agree upon the diagnosis, but not everyone may consent to the therapy. Indeed, for healing, things have to be sacrificed at times and separation or loss might always be heartbreak and leave scars of remorse or regret. (“Sorrow”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When the bonfire of love still smolders in the wake of emotional convulsions, seeds of regret and remorse may endlessly linger about on the path of life. ("Taken for a ride)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.”
― Peter Matthiessen

“Regret and remorse represent a constant tension in our inner architecture and an ongoing interaction between self-knowledge and moral growth. ("Island of regret.- Island of remorse.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If remorse is regret amplified by moral awareness, it implies deeper involvement with the suffering of others, grounded in empathy, reflecting insufficient emotional investment. ("Island of regret- Island of remorse.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

“Remorse is a terrible thing to bear, Pam, one of the worst of all punishments in this life. To wish undone something you have done, to wish you could look back on kindness to someone you love, instead of on unkindness - that is a very terrible thing.”
― Enid Blyton, House at the Corner

“It will never stop hurting but it will stop mattering.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“Truly there are different kinds of pain.  But the most agonizing is the pain of regret, for which there is no lasting relief and no remedy.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in my first unhappy time. Then, I would say to her, "Biddy, I think you once liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since. If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am so sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier of you than I was --not much, but a little. And Biddy, it shall rest with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me, which I set aside when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now, dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I did not want to be taken for a fool – the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Crimson Curtain

“You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sin, you know, and cry tears doing it that are genuine as any.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Feeling guilty is not a substitute for loving somebody; it only is an indicator that you have failed to love somebody.”
― Clifford Cohen

“And so there’s a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we’ve done that’s hurt other people—that keeps us human.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

“Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there’s true remorse. Nothing will be right until there’s that.”
“He looks so, sort of, weakened.”
“Weakened is not enough. Destroyed isn’t enough. He’s got to repent and feel humiliation and regret. I won’t be satisfied until he knows what he is.”
"Do we know what we are?"
"We know we aren’t him. We know that to that degree we don’t yet deserve the lowest circle of hell.”
― Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres