Last Updated on August 16, 2023
Does quotes about remorse help? Regret and remorse are common emotions that many of us experience at some point in our lives.
Whether it’s a decision we made, a mistake we regret, or a missed opportunity, it’s easy to get caught up in feelings of guilt and shame.
However, it’s important to remember that these emotions are a natural part of the human experience and can be used as a catalyst for growth and positive change.
One way to help process and work through feelings of remorse is through the use of quotes.
Quotes can be a powerful tool for self-reflection and introspection, offering insights and wisdom from those who have experienced similar emotions and situations.
By reading quotes about remorse, we can gain a new perspective on our experiences and find the motivation to move forward and make positive changes in our lives.
In my own experience, I have found that quotes about remorse have been a helpful tool for processing difficult emotions and finding the courage to make positive changes in my life.
One quote that has always resonated with me is from the writer and poet Maya Angelou, who said, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
This quote has helped me to recognize that while I may have made mistakes in the past, I can use those experiences to learn and grow, and make better decisions in the future.
Another quote that has helped me to find peace and closure in difficult situations is from the philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
This quote has helped me to recognize that while it’s important to learn from our mistakes and take responsibility for our actions, it’s also important to forgive ourselves and move forward with a positive attitude and a renewed sense of purpose.
Overall, quotes about remorse can be a helpful tool for anyone who is struggling with difficult emotions or experiences.
By reading and reflecting on these quotes, we can gain a new perspective on our experiences, find the motivation to make positive changes in our lives, and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose and self-awareness.
Remorse Quotes To Own Your Mistake
1. “Remorse is the pain of sin.” – Theodore Parker
2. “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
3. “Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
4. “In a moment of unusual clarity, we eliminate suffering by not wishing for a different life. When we affirm every manifold of our life, we begin to experience the first ray of personal illumination and commence trending on a road of living without regrets and remorse.” – Kilroy J. Oldster
5. “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.” – Erik Pevernagie
6. “Real remorse can’t be choreographed.” – Melanie A. Smith
7. “Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.” – George Moore
8. “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
9. “Our repentances are generally not so much a concern and remorse for the harm we have done, as a fear of the harm we may have brought upon ourselves.” – François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld
10. “Revenge is hollow and insatiable. It never satisfies; it never heals. It leaves us remorseful or hungry for more.” – Wayne Gerard Trotman
11. “Past remorse becomes motivating fire.” – Dean H. Wild
12. “Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase are fruits of innocence and blessedness.” – William C. Bryant
13. “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.” – Erik Pevernagie
14. “The ‘need to know others’ is the beginning of world peace. Remorse is the path to wisdom. Honest friends are the result of wisdom” – Rian Mileti
15. “Humans, we survive differently. We numb those empty feelings, we revert to anger and hatred. We block out remorse because we no longer want to care. It’s an escape of some sort, to hide the long periods of trying to deal with the bouts of bullshit in the right way. We betray ourselves, we lose our values, and worse, we forget who we are.” – Arti Manani
16. “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” – Mary Bertone
17. “Sometimes, the mistake is not the problem; the lack of remorse is the real mistake.” – Michael Bassey Johnson
18. “Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
19. “Wiersbe suggests that a distinction can be made between regret, remorse and repentance. Regret is that activity of the mind (intellect) that causes us to say, “Why did I do that?” Remorse touches us a little deeper causing us to feel disgust and pain (involving both the intellect and the heart), but not causing us to change our ways. True repentance brings in the third aspect of our minds – our will. To truly repent one must have a change of will. “Godly sorrow” is the catalyst that brings us to true repentance.” – Carey Dillinger
20. “I need to confront my loss, not run away from it. I wanted to wade in with my eyes open and all my senses alert. I wanted to register everything, from the giant waves of sorrow to the inkiest ripples of remorse. I didn’t want to miss any of it.” – alex George
21. “Prefer loss to the wealth of dishonest gain. The former vexes you for a time the latter will bring you lasting remorse.” – Chilo
22. “The feeling was so much worse than regret, which was just a nagging thought in the brain. Remorse was having your insides replaced by worms.” – Samantha Downing
23. “Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she’s thought much worse things about you.” – Jean Rostand
24. “Accountability is not just about being or feeling sorry— it is about a set of actions that demonstrate remorse in practice. And it is not the feeling of remorse that delivers us from our shame— it is the practice of accountability in action. It is doing sorry.” – Danielle Sered
25. “The best you can hope for is a little peace and not too much remorse. Thoughts at peace under an English heaven.” – Iris Murdoch
26. “Time was imperfect, but if redirected to positive ends, it would mend some remorse.” – Ken Goldstein
27. “Reflection offers a retrospective exploration, a way to figure out how everything fits and connects now on your journey- and being done so without regret or remorse. Reflection is the birthplace of discernment, an insightful and awakening place that grants you to keep what you need and smartly sift away the rest.” – Christine Evangelou
28. “What a difference between people! One person feels guilty about stepping on an ant while another remorselessly murders millions .” – Marty Rubin
29. “Remorse! Can a heart like mine ever know the meaning of such a feeling? The habit of evildoing expunged it long ago from my calloused soul.” – Marquis de Sade
30. “It’s better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.” – Amin Maalouf
“31. So what is a psychopath? How about a narcissist or a sociopath? They’re manipulative people—completely devoid of empathy—who intentionally cause harm to others without any sense of remorse or responsibility.” – Jackson MacKenzie
32. “Total self-esteem requires total and unconditional acceptance of yourself. You are a unique and worthy individual, regardless of your mistakes, defeats and failures, despite what others may think, say or feel about you or your behavior. If you truly accept and love yourself, you won’t have a driving need for attention and approval. Self-esteem is a genuine love of self. Stop all adverse value judging of yourself. Stop accepting the adverse value judgements of others. Purge yourself of all condemnation, shame, blame, guilt & remorse.” – Unknown
33. “Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance, its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the latter to a soul changed for the better.” – Joseph Joubert
34. “Uncertainty is an excruciating state in which to exist. A moral question that never appeared in my study continues to claim prominence in my mind: Is it possible to look someone you love in the eye and tell a lie without experiencing remorse?” – Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen
35. “Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.” – Christopher Isherwood
36. “Intentionally and remorselessly harming someone else is what makes an abuser.” – Jackson MacKenzie
37. “But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. […] True sorrow is as rare as true love.” – Stephen King
38. “Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.” – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
39. “In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.” – Jonathan Safran Foer
40. “Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong; it can end everything.” – Honore De Balzac
41. “Repentance is accepted remorse.” – Sophie Swetchine
42. “Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering.” – Julian Barnes
43. “Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.” – Honore de Balzac
44. “Remorse is cureless, the disease not even God can heal.” – Emily Dickinson
45. “The acts we engage in for appeasment today, we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.” – Winston Churchill
46. “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
47. “It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.” – Mark Twain
48. “There is no man that is knowingly wicked but is guilty to himself, and there is no man that carries guilt about him but he receives a sting in his soul.” – John Tillotson
49. “Farewell, remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.” – John Milton
50. “For my part, I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man’s moral senses,–the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all.” – William Makepeace Thackeray
51. “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
52. “Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.” – Honore de Balzac
53. “Living in regret will become your biggest regret.” – Bill Johnson
54. “Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
55. “Not sharp revenge, nor hell itself can find, A fiercer torment than a guilty mind, Which day and night doth dreadfully accuse, Condemns the wretch, and still the charge renews.” – John Dryden
56. “Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity, and above all, no remorse.” – Joe Abercrombie
57. “Yet each man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be heardSome do it with a bitter lookSome with a flattering wordThe coward does it with a kissThe brave man with a sword.” – Oscar Wilde
58. “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
59. “There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
60. “Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.” – Gregory Maguire
61. “Besides the pleasure, there is always remorse, from the indulgence of our passions; and, after all, what have you men to fear from all this; the world excuses, and notoriety ennobles you?” – Alexandre Dumas
62. “The greatest chastisement that a man may receive who hath outraged another, is to have done the outrage; and there is no man who is so rudely punished as he that is subject to the whip of his own repentance.” – Seneca the Younger
63. “She’d been conceived as a goddess of justice. But this wasn’t just.It wasn’t right. And her husband’s wrongful death would not go unavenged. Kissing cold lips Bathymaas laid him on the ground and covered his body with her cloak. Artemis gasped and shrank away from her as she rose to her feet and turned towards Apollo and his mother. For this, there would be hell to pay. And hers would be the hand that gathered the payment.” – Sherrilyn Kenyon
64. “Remorse begets reform.” – William Cowper
65. “…burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.” – Donald Miller
66. “Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.” – Horace
67. “His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it.” – Émile Zola
68. “Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that’s ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.” – Anne Rice
69. “Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid, In every bosom where her nest is made, Hatched by the beams of truth, denies him rest, And proves a raging scorpion in his breast.” – William Cowper
70. “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
71. “There is “a mental fatigue which is a spurious kind of remorse, and has all the anguish of the nobler feeling. It is an utter weariness and prostration of spirit, a sickness of heart and mind, a bitter longing to lie down and die.” – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
72. “After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she’d quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.” – Lisi Harrison
73. “A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton
74. “Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.” – Gail Godwin
75. “It’s difficult the first time you have to get close to kill another. You see their eyes, see the light in it go out. Even a troll’s eyes have that light. I’d be worried if you didn’t feel something after that. I don’t like hunting with a man who’s a killer without that feeling.” – Raymond E. Feist
76. “And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father’s remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.” – Khaled Hosseini
77. “I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty towards her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.” – Lorrie Moore
78. “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
79. “On the throne, one has many worries; and remorse is the one that weighs the least.” – Jean Racine
80. “Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
81. “It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.” – P.G. Wodehouse
82. “Sharp and fell remorse, the offspring of my sin! Why do you, O God, lacerate my heart so late? Why, O boding cries, that scream so close to me,–why do I listen to you now, and never heard you before?” – Pietro Metastasio
83. “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
84. “The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in the excess of grief.” – Mary Shelley
85. “Remorse is violent dyspepsia of the mind.” – Ogden Nash
86. “Remorse is the fruit of crime.” – Juvenal
87. “I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.” – George Saunders
88. “Lo, God! I am Thy handiwork. I have sinned and have done great evil, yet I am still Thy handiwork, who hath made me what I am. So, though I may not undo that which I have done, yet I may, with Thy aid, do better hereafter than I have done heretofore.” – Howard Pyle
RELATED: 302 Inspiring Daily Habit Quotes To Build A Better Life
89. “Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks.”Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands”; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)”You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see.”I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea.” – T.S. Eliot
90. “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;Evil,be thou my good.” – John Milton
91. “Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind, But it is very difficult to treat because it cannot even be defined, Because everything is not gold that glisters and everything is not a tear that glistens, And one man’s remorse is another man’s reminiscence.” – Ogden Nash
92. “Remorse is the poison of life.” – Charlotte Bronte
93. “You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn’t strike you down. The sky didn’t fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out… It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.” – Glen Duncan
94. “There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.” – Gilbert Parker
95. “Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.” – John Wayne
96. “Remorse sleeps in the atmosphere of prosperity.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
97. “Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress’ wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don’t show your teeth in remorse).” – Cornell Woolrich
98. “Remorse weeps tears of blood.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
99. “You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.” – John Connolly
100. “Remorse.– Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
RELATED: 45 Songs About Regret To Identify With In Your Regrettable Situations
Remorse Quotes About Life
101. “Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
102. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” – Ernest Hemingway
103. “All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled; Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.” – William Blake
104. “Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.” – William Blake
105. “When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.” – William Butler Yeats
106. “There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.” – Seneca the Elder
107. “High minds, of native pride and force, Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse; Fear, for their scourge, means villains have, Thou art the torturer of the brave!” – Walter Scott
108. “I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.” – Ogden Nash
109. “We pledge our loyalty; we affirm our determination to be of good courage; we declare, sometimes even publicly, that come what may we will do the right thing, that we will stand for the right cause, that we will be true to ourselves and to others. Then the pressures begin to build. Sometimes these are social pressures. Sometimes they are personal appetites. Sometimes they are false ambitions. There is a weakening of the will. There is a softening of discipline. There is capitulation. And then there is remorse, self-accusation, and bitter tears of regret.” – Gordon B. Hinckley
110. “One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.” – Victor Hugo
111. “I cannot show remorse because I do not believe I am guilty.” – Lyn Nofziger
112. “Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
113. “…conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.” – Charles Darwin
114. “He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
115. “In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race – never quite sane in the night.” – Mark Twain
116. “Guilt doesn’t help. What should fill in for it? Remorse. Remorse is when you feel bad about what you did. Guilt is when you feel bad about who you are.” – David D. Burns
117. “I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstorm realize. That light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depth of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.” – Haruki Murakami
118. “Abandon all remorse; On horror’s head horrors accumulate.” – William Shakespeare
119. “Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.” – Karl Kraus
120. “It isn’t the experience of today that drives men mad. It is the remorse for something that happened yesterday, and the dread of what tomorrow may disclose.” – Robert Jones Burdette
121. “Remorse for what is done is useless.” – Philo
122. “The nation wept tears of remorse for their leader: the tear-gas accomplished what was expected.” – Minimaks
123. “There is anguish in the recollection that we have not adequately appreciated the affection of those whom we have loved and lost.” – Benjamin Disraeli
124. “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. … We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
125. “Be greatful to the man who cares nothing for your remorse. You are his equal.” – Rene Char
126. “Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth – two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.” – Ambrose Bierce
127. “I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I’ve done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don’t like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven’t a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue.” – Louisa May Alcott
128. “Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.” – Anita Loos
129. “There is no heart without remorse, no life without some misfortune, no one but what is something stained with sin.” – James Ellis
130. “Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.” – William James
131. “What is learned without pleasure is forgotten without remorse.” – Epictetus
132. “The urging of that word, judgment, hath bred a kind of remorse in me.” – William Shakespeare
133. “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
134. “And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!” – Michael Biehn
135. “Remorse turns us against ourselves.” – Nicolas Chamfort
136. “There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.” – H. G. Wells
137. “It is better to be affected with a true penitent sorrow for sin than to be able to resolve the most difficult cases about it.” – Thomas a Kempis
138. “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.” – Eric Hoffer
139. “For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs-as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.” – Charles Darwin
140. “Remorse – Regret that one waited so long to do it.” – H. L. Mencken
141. “Guilt, remorse. It’s what separates us from the animals.” – Arthur Mitchell
142. “And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.” – Aldous Huxley
143. “Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.” – William Carlos Williams
144. “There are evil spirits who suddenly fix their abode in man’s unguarded breast, causing us to commit devilish deeds, and then, hurrying back to their native hell, leave behind the stings of remorse in the poisoned bosom.” – Friedrich Schiller
RELATED: 361 Uplifting Quotes To Start The New Week On A Positive Note
145. “And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?” – Khalil Gibran
146. “Wisdom and virtue are by no means sufficient, without the supplemental laws of good-breeding, to secure freedom from degenerating into rudeness, or self esteem from swelling into insolence. A thousand incivilities may be committed, and a thousand offices neglected. without any remorse of conscience, or reproach from reason.” – Samuel Johnson
147. “Man, wretched man, whene’er he stoops to sin, Feels, with the act, a strong remorse within.” – Juvenal
148. “There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom– freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.” – Eric Hoffer
149. “Men who stand in the highest ranks of society seldom hear of their faults; if by any accident an opprobrious clamour reaches their ears, flattery is always at hand to pour in her opiates, to quiet conviction and obtund remorse.” – Samuel Johnson
150. “It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
151. “Psychopaths view any social exchange as a ‘feeding opportunity,’ a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.” – Robert D. Hare
152. “Well the first thing I’d say is that I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to do to show my remorse other than to say that I’m remorseful.” – Jayson Blair
153. “Bashfulness may sometimes exclude pleasure, but seldom opens any avenue to sorrow or remorse.” – Samuel Johnson
154. “To be left alone, and face to face with my own crime, had been just retribution.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
155. “Every fresh act of sin lessens fear and remorse, hardens our hearts, blunts the edge of our conscience, and increases our evil inclination.” – J. C. Ryle
156. “From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?” – Ray Bradbury
157. “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” – William Shakespeare
158. “Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames devotion, but only for the occasion.” – John Henry Newman
159. “You cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.” – Khalil Gibran
160. “A wise man has said: ‘Only a Christian can live wholly in the present, for to him the past is pardoned and the future is safe in God.’ …the Christian life must be a life without regrets, without remorse.” – Evelyn Underhill
161. “For perpetrators, when they apologize and experience remorse, it gives them a chance to reclaim their own humanity. Some rise to the moral challenge. Others of course don’t care, and they continue acting with contempt.” – Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
162. “You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.” – Umberto Eco
163. “Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores; And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
164. “Remorse … is one of the many afflictions for which time finds a cure.” – Winifred Holtby
165. “Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven.” – Lew Wallace
166. “In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.” – William Butler Yeats
167. “I would far rather feel remorse than know how to define it.” – Thomas a Kempis
168. “I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.” – Lee Kuan Yew
169. “Legalistic remorse says, “I broke God’s rules,” while real repentance says, “I broke God’s heart.”” – Timothy Keller
170. “Each life is unique. But for all, repentance will surely include passing through the portal of humble prayer. Our Father in Heaven can allow us to feel fully the conviction of our sins. He knows the depths of our remorse. He can then direct what we must do to qualify for forgiveness.” – Henry B. Eyring
171. “Being conscious of having done a wicked action leaves stings of remorse behind it, which, like an ulcer in the flesh, makes the mind smart with perpetual wounds; for reason, which chases away all other pains, creates repentance, shames the soul with confusion, and punishes it with torment.” – Plutarch
172. “If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,–the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,–we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
173. “The sinner does not feel any remorse over his sins, that is because his heart is already dead.” – Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya
174. “I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms.” – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
175. “Each river is different, but they all eventually lead to the ocean. No matter what we’re doing or when, or whether it brings us happiness or remorse, gain or loss, we’re all on our individual paths to enlightenment. Even when we’ve done something we consider wrong, we’re still on our path to enlightenment.” – Chris Prentiss
176. “From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.” – Ray Bradbury
177. “Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?” – Yukio Mishima
178. “Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.” – Pascal Bruckner
179. “Listen and understand. That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” – Michael Biehn
180. “The love of a dog for his master is notorious; in the agony of death he has been known to caress his master, and everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.” – Charles Darwin
181. “Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.” – Jennifer Worth
182. “It’s hard not to hate. People, things, institutions. When they break your spirit and take pleasure in watching you bleed, hate is the only feeling that makes sense. That’s what I need to tell you. To let you know how hard I’m trying not to cave under the weight of all the awful things I feel in my heart. When I look at my day, I realize most of it was spent cleaning up the damage of the day before. In that life I have no future. All I have is distraction and remorse.” – J-Ax
183. “Some People are not to be persuaded to taste of any Creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with, while they were alive; others extend their Scruple no further than to their own Poultry, and refuse to eat what they fed and took care of themselves; yet all of them will feed heartily and without Remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.” – Bernard de Mandeville
184. “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.” – Arthur Miller
185. “Guilt is a gift from Allah warning you that what you are doing is violating your soul.” – Nouman Ali Khan
186. “It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; – although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.” – Charles Dickens
187. “I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a Divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soulI hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the true Faith of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.” – Pope Pius XII
188. “Avoidance of sin is lighter than the pain of remorse.” – Umar
189. “I still feel pangs of remorse over an insidious habit I’ve had since I was a teenager. About three times a week, I attend estate auctions and make insulting, low-ball bids for prized heirlooms until I’m asked to leave.” – Dennis Miller
190. “I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
191. “Sometimes when we’re feeling sad, it’s important just to feel the sadness. Like a snake shedding its skin, old feelings of remorse and regret and hurt and anger often have to come up in order to be released. On the other side we’re a better person, capable of a happier life…who we are when we’re no longer burdened by the buried feelings that weighed us down, or the self – defeating patterns that the pain produced.” – Marianne Williamson
192. “The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring.” – Mary Catherine Bateson
193. “Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.”- Bryan Procter
194. “We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse…we should strive to keep worry from our life.” – Baruch Spinoza
195. “A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of it’s complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.” – Francoise Sagan
196. “It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.” – Yann Martel
197. “The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.” – Jean-Dominique Bauby
198. “The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It’s perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable — any life.” – Oscar Wilde
199. “Flesh and blood, You, brother mine, that entertain’d ambition, Expell’d remorse and nature, who, with Sebastian- Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong- Would here have kill’d your king, I do forgive thee, Unnatural though thou art.” – William Shakespeare
200. “When you look for independence and you get what you want, how come you look back thinking what have I done?” – Joey Tempest
Popular Remorse Quotes & Sayings From Renowned People
201. “For my omniscience paid I toll In infinite remorse of soul. All sin was of my sinning, all Atoning mine, and mine the gall Of all regret. Mine was the weight Of every brooded wrong, the hate That stood behind each envious thrust, Mine every greed, mine every lust. And all the while for every grief, Each suffering, I craved relief With individual desire, – Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire About a thousand people crawl; Perished with each, — then mourned for all!” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
202. “When I think of the person that I thought was Bill Clinton, I think he had genuine remorse. When I think of the person that I now see is 100 percent politician, I think he’s sorry he got caught.” – Monica Lewinsky
203. “Situations in life often permit no delay; and when we cannot determine the course which is certainly best, we must follow the one which is probably the best. This frame of mind freed me also from the repentance and remorse commonly felt by those vacillating individuals who are always seeking as worthwhile things which they later judge to be bad.” – Rene Descartes
204. “Yes, God loves you this very day and always. He is not waiting to love you until you have overcome your weaknesses and bad habits. He loves you today with a full understanding of your struggles. He is aware that you reach up to Him in heartfelt and hopeful prayer. He knows of the times you have held onto the fading light and believed-even in the midst of growing darkness. He knows of your sufferings. He knows of your remorse for the times you have fallen short or failed. And still He loves you.” – Dieter F. Uchtdorf
205. “Only true remorse and “Will you forgive me?” can press the reset button.” – Andy Andrews
206. “Wickedness is a wonderfully diligent architect of misery, of shame, accompanied with terror, and commotion, and remorse, and endless perturbation.” – Plutarch
207. “We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done- of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.” – Charles Dickens
208. “Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. “Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands”; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) “You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see.” I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.” – T. S. Eliot
209. “So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death.” – Lord Byron
210. “It would be an endless battle if it were all up to ego because it does not destroy and is not destroyed by itself It is like a wave it makes itself up, it rushes forward getting nowhere really it crashes, withdraws and makes itself up again pulls itself together with pride towers with pride rushes forward into imaginary conquest crashes in frustration withdraws with remorse and repentance pulls itself together with new resolution.” – Agnes Martin
211. “The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse.” – H. P. Lovecraft
212. “Forgiveness is possible even when there is no restitution, no remorse on the part of the perpetrator.” – Virginia H. Pearce
213. “Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.” – William Carlos Williams
214. “To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.” – William Hazlitt
215. “My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: ‘the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'” – Pete Hamill
216. “So I make no effort to hide my pain. I don’t ever put it all on display like this—but for today and all the rest of the days of the trial, I must. My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by the pundits and talking heads. But I’m told it’s necessary; the world needs to see me vulnerable and wounded. I cannot appear not to care or to lack remorse, but that removes a crucial component of my self- defense mechanism and leaves me bleeding for all the world to see. I suppose that’s rather the point.” – Ann Aguirre
217. “Remorse is memory awake.” – Emily Dickinson
218. “She’d absolutely adored the library_an entire building where anyone could take things they didn’t own and feel no remorse about it.” – Ally Carter
219. “Mr. Jefferson has reason to reflect upon himself. How he will get rid of his remorse in his retirement, I know not. He must know that he leaves the government infinitely worse than he found it, and that from his own error or ignorance.” – John Adams
220. “Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world… Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest to respect a victorious nation.” – Khaled Mashal
221. “I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked” – Richard Russo
222. “Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.” – Charlotte Bronte
223. “‘Oh, poor, poor fellow!’ said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.” – E. M. Forster
224. “I certainly didn’t emerge from prison regretting anything I ever wrote, nor did I feel remorse for my crime in the least.” – Jim Goad
225. “I will describe the choices I made, continue to take responsibility for my decisions, and express my remorse to Judge Salas and the public. I am heartbroken that this is affecting my family – especially my four young daughters, who mean more to me than anything in the world.” – Teresa Giudice
226. “I don’t have a seller’s remorse about how I’ve lived. I am cognizant of what I have done, and any of us could maybe draw the line better. But I’ve tried to live pretty fearlessly.” – Kevin Costner
227. “Until we have finally accepted the fact that there is nothing we can do to change the past, our feelings of regret and remorse and bitterness will prevent us from designing a better future with the opportunity that is before us today.” – Jim Rohn
228. “You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, – mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, – you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day’s work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, – nothing left in you.” – Joseph Conrad
229. “At the end of the day, every child has learned the Lesson of Spin: Almost every wrong action can be stripped of consequences, along with the need for feelings of guilt and remorse.” – Bill O’Reilly
230. “Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood.” – Victor Hugo
231. “I’ll do anything to stop my son running out into the street. I’ll take a bullet for him. He’s hit me a few times. He shows no remorse afterward.” – Farrah Fawcett
232. “To some people, bankers – code word for Jewish – and guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.” – Rush Limbaugh
233. “Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories.” – Jon Ronson
234. “I think for Laura [Bush] it was kind of a sense of remorse because she is very close to the girls. They’re busy little souls, and so we don’t see them as much as we’d like to. But Laura talks to them all the time.” – George W. Bush
235. “You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
236. “Beneath the skin, there is fear. Pain. Remorse. Yearning. Desire. A fierce longing for power. All of this. We are joined. It is as if we live in the center of a great storm. Around us the world of the realms revolves like a giant kaleidoscope, images refracted again and again. So many worlds! So much to know.” – Libba Bray
237. “There is some consensus: There’s obsession, there’s never satiety, and there’s always remorse. For me, the big thing is that you’re always breaking a promise – for example, you promise yourself you’re just going to have coffee with a man, then before you know it, you’re in bed together.” – Susan Cheever
238. “I admired my father very much… at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, – but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.” – Delmore Schwartz
239. “WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.” – Paul Farmer
240. “I did not want to be taken for a fool-the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.” – Jules Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly
241. “Lord, protect our decisions, because making Decision is a way of praying. Give us the courage after our doubts, to be able to choose between one road and another. May our YES always be a YES and our NO always be a NO. Once we have chosen our road, may we never look back nor allow our soul to be eaten away by remorse. And in order for this to be possible.” – Paulo Coelho
242. “If your decision-making is improved on the ground, certainly you’ll be less likely to make the kind of errors that will linger with you the rest of your life and lead to regret, remorse, and a whole cascade of psychological dysfunction.” – Amishi Jha
243. “Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.” – Oscar Wilde
244. “Remorse is sorrow over being caught and the pain of consequences that follow. Repentance is not being concerned for ourselves but having a contrite heart.” – Charles R. Swindoll
245. “Men become cannibals of their own hearts; remorse, regret, and restless impatience usurp the place of more wholesome feeling: every thing seems better than that which is.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
246. “Not to be cowardly when it comes to our own actions! Not to leave them in the lurch!–The sting of conscience is indecent.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
247. “If you did something in 1975 that you deeply regret and that you now can recognize as having been profoundly irresponsible, for example, the only way to be lifted out of deep regret and the pain over it is through atonement – through the kind of remorse that leads to genuine atonement, the making of amends, and forgiveness of self and others.” – Marianne Williamson
248. “Remorse has no place in a warrior’s mind… A war is like a game of chess, Nicholaa. Every battle is like a well-thought-out move on the board. Once it begins, there shouldn’t be any emotion involved whatsoever.” – Julie Garwood
249. “Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.” – Carl Rogers
250. “Rejoicing is the essence of genuine worship. A sad face (apart from remorse for sin or regret concerning the pain of others) is an affront to a gracious and generous God.” – Max Anders
251. “Now I have shed my first blood. I feel no qualms, no pride, no remorse. There is only a weary indifference that will follow me throughout the war.” – Audie Murphy
252. “Trust is about keeping commitments, but in many instances, circumstances change and organizations therefore shed commitments, things such as retiree medical benefits, pension obligations, and even employees without much remorse or maybe even hesitation.” – Jeffrey Pfeffer
253. “Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third.” – Malcolm Lowry
254. “Sometimes a woman’s love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.” – Thomas Hardy
255. “If you’re married to an entrenched non-apologizer, it won’t help to doggedly demand one. Some folks lack the self-esteem required to take responsibility for their less than honorable behaviors, feel remorse, and offer a heartfelt apology. And many people are so hard on themselves for the mistakes they make, they don’t have the emotional room to admit vulnerability and apologize to a partner.” – Harriet Lerner
256. “Temptation can be tormenting, but remember: The torment of temptation to sin is nothing to compare with the torment of the consequences of sin. Remorse and regret cannot compensate for sin….though sins can be forgiven immediately – the consequences can last a lifetime” – Edwin Louis Cole
257. “Thousands of animals (now billions) are butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the human race.” – Romain Rolland
258. “All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.” – Victor Hugo
259. “I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
260. “It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush… It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.” – Charles Darwin
261. “If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?” – Allison Winn Scotch
262. “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul…Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” – Charles Dickens
263. “The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous.” – Anna Letitia Barbauld
264. “The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.” – Emile M. Cioran
265. “I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.” – Charles Baudelaire
266. “Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.” – Cyril Connolly
267. “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.” – Ronald Speirs
268. “I wealthiest am when richest in remorse.” – Robert Southwell
269. “Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.” – Jean Anouilh
270. “Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.” – Cyril Connolly
271. “Shun delays, they breed remorse; Take thy time while time is lent thee; Creeping snails have weakest force, Fly their fault lest thou repent thee. Good is best when soonest wrought, Linger’d labours come to nought.” – Robert Southwell
272. “Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.” – Cyril Connolly
273. “To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.” – Romain Rolland
274. “There’s a difference between remorse and repentance. Remorse is being sorry for being caught. Repentance is being sorry enough to stop.” – Greg Laurie
275. “I saw the various museum displays including scenes of torture while feeling heartfelt remorse and sorrow over the great pain and suffering inflicted on South Koreans by Japan’s colonial rule.” – Junichiro Koizumi
276. “What’s that poem again?” Will, who had been twirling his empty teacup around his fingers, stood up straight and declaimed: “Each spake words of high disdain, And insult to his heart’s best brother—” “Oh, by the Angel, Will, do be quiet,” said Charlotte, standing up. “I must go and write a letter to Aloysius Starkweather that drips remorse and pleading. I don’t need you distracting me.” And, gathering up her skirts, she hurried from the room. “No appreciation for the arts,” Will murmured, setting his teacup down.” – Cassandra Clare
RELATED: 225 Encouraging Darkness Light Quotes To Help You Find Your Way
277. “When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds … Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?” – David Hume
278. “When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God’s gift of grace.” – Brennan Manning
279. “By retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns; so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.” – William Hazlitt
280. “What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires – how many aspirations after goodness and truth – how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!” – Walt Whitman
281. “Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?” – Mary Wollstonecraft
282. “You must make a daily effort to look upon others without condemnation. Every judgment takes you away from your goal of peace. Your ego loves your judgments, because with them you remain in a constant state of anguish and remorse. Keep in mind that you do not define anyone with your judgment; you only define yourself as someone who needs to be judged.” – Wayne Dyer
283. “We had some port, and drank damnation to the play and eternal remorse to the author.” – James Boswell
284. “That’s what a conscience is made of, scar tissue … Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.” – Margaret Millar
285. “The real affliction of old age is remorse.” – Cesare Pavese
286. “Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often produces a relapse, which is remorse–a malady far more dreadful than the first disease, because it is incurable.” – Charles Caleb Colton
287. “Regret or remorse of the wrong we have done should be in a positive spirit of changing, turning towards God with humility.” – Radhanath Swami
288. “Any pleasure that would keep you from Christ is a sinful pleasure that will doubtless cause you anguish, heartache, tears and remorse.” – John R. Rice
289. “Mastery is great, but even that is not enough. You have to be able to change course without a bead of sweat, or remorse.” – Tom Peters
290. “Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.” – William Hazlitt
291. “Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.” – Aldous Huxley
292. “Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.” – Laura Riding
293. “There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn’t that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.” – George Santayana
294. “Remorse of conscience is like an old wound; a man is in no condition to fight under such circumstances. The pain abates his vigor and takes up too much of his attention.” – Jeremy Collier
295. “My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.” – Natalia Ginzburg
296. “No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution, just people selling t-shirts.” – Don Henley
297. “Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?” – Ivan Turgenev
298. “I take my chances. I can’t cling to remorse or regret.” – Mary Chapin Carpenter
299. “As pills that are outwardly fair, gilt, and rolled in sugar, but within are full of bitterness, even so lustful pleasure is no sooner hatched but remorse is at hand, ready to supplant her.” – Daniel Cawdry
300. “I am sorry,” I whispered. “I am sorry for all of the ways that I failed you. I am sorry that I was not there to save you, or to die alongside you. I am sorry that I have kept you with me for so long, trapped in my heart, bound in sorrow and remorse. I forgive you too. I forgive you for leaving me, and I forgive you for returning. I forgive you your anger, and your grief. Let this be an end to it.” – John Connolly
301. “Permanent remorse about failing to do your human duty, in my opinion, can be worse than losing your life.” – Miep Gies
302. “I felt for my crime a just terror; I looked on my life with hate, and my passion with horror.” – Jean Racine
303. “Yet only when we come to understand, in the light of the Cross, the evil we are capable of, and have even been a part of, can we experience true remorse and true repentance.” – Pope Francis
304. “As every flower fades and as all youth departs, so life at every stage, so every virtue, so our grasp of truth blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age, be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour, be ready bravely and without remorse to find new light that old ties cannot give. In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live.” – Hermann Hesse
305. “A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer’s remorse.” – Ken Buck
306. “I’ve come to believe that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who feels no remorse. The one who never apologizes and therefore seeks no forgiveness. Because in the end it is our emotions that make us weak, not our actions.” – Tahereh Mafi
307. “It was in His parting sorrow–that Jesus asked His disciples to remember Him; and never was entreaty of affection answered so; for ever since has His name been breathed in morning and evening prayers that none can count, and has brought down some gift of sanctity and peace on the anguish of bereavement, and the remorse of sin.” – James Martineau
308. “Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.” – Cyril Connolly
309. “If money doesn’t come with misery, then it’s not at all interesting and it’s not at all fair. It seems if you have all this money, and no misery, you’re really in a world of unalloyed happiness, and that seems to violate some deep principle of universal justice. We tend to live in a culture now where people have unbelievable, inconceivable amounts of money without any kind of remorse.” – Lawrence Douglas
310. “My trigger finger itching, positioned at your dome, one twitch and it’s on. No remorse or second thoughts.” – Snoop Dogg
311. “Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed … onto the train … into the chair in the sickroom … and is suddenly transported to a place where light fights dark and wins. When the story’s over, one is left without a hangover, without remorse. Can any other opiate make that claim?” – Mary Cantwell
312. “As you consider your own life, are there things that you need to change? Have you made mistakes that still need to be corrected? If you are suffering from feelings of guilt or remorse, bitterness or anger, or loss of faith, I invite you to seek relief. Repent and forsake your sins. Then, in prayer, ask God for forgiveness. Seek forgiveness from those you have wronged. Forgive those who have wronged you. Forgive yourself.” – C. Scott Grow
313. “Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.” – Karl Kraus
RELATED: 180 Gentle Quotes About Nervousness To Decrease Anxiety And Bring A Sense Of Calm
How Can Reading Quotes About Remorse Be Beneficial?
Reading quotes about remorse can be beneficial in a number of ways. First and foremost, they can offer a source of comfort and validation.
If you are feeling regret or remorse about a decision you made, reading quotes from others who have experienced similar emotions can help you to feel less alone and more understood.
In addition, quotes about remorse can offer a new perspective on your experiences.
They can help you to see your situation from a different angle and offer insights into how to move forward in a positive way.
For example, a quote about forgiveness can help you to recognize the importance of letting go of grudges and moving on from past mistakes.
Quotes about remorse can also serve as a source of motivation and inspiration.
They can remind you that while mistakes are a natural part of life, it’s how we respond to them that matters most.
By reading quotes about resilience and perseverance, you can find the strength and motivation to overcome challenges and make positive changes in your life.
Finally, reading quotes about remorse can be a helpful tool for self-reflection and introspection.
They can help you to identify patterns in your behavior, recognize areas where you need to improve, and make a plan for how to move forward in a positive way.
By taking the time to reflect on your experiences and how they have shaped you, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your values, and make more informed decisions in the future.
Next Steps
Implementing quotes about remorse into your daily life can help you to stay focused on your goals, maintain a positive attitude, and find the motivation to make positive changes.
Here are some ways to implement quotes about remorse into your daily routine:
- Read A Quote In The Morning: Start your day by reading a quote about remorse and reflection. This can help to set a positive tone for the day and remind you of the importance of learning from your mistakes.
- Write Down A Quote: Write down a quote about remorse that resonates with you on a sticky note or in a journal. This can serve as a reminder throughout the day to stay focused on your goals and make positive changes.
- Use A Quote As A Mantra: Repeat a quote about remorse as a mantra throughout the day. This can help to shift your mindset and encourage you to stay positive and focused on making positive changes in your life.
- Reflect On A Quote: Take a few moments at the end of the day to reflect on a quote about remorse. Ask yourself how it applies to your life and what changes you can make to improve your situation.
- Share A Quote: Share a quote about remorse with a friend or family member who may be going through a difficult time. This can help to offer comfort and validation and encourage them to stay positive and focused on making positive changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Should I Read Quotes About Remorse?
Reading quotes about remorse can help you to feel less alone in your experiences and offer insights into how to move forward in a positive way.
They can also serve as a source of motivation and inspiration, remind you that while mistakes are a natural part of life, it’s how we respond to them that matters most.
Can Quotes About Remorse Really Help Me Feel Better?
Yes, quotes about remorse can provide comfort and validation during difficult times.
They can also help you to shift your perspective and find the motivation to make positive changes in your life.
Reading quotes about resilience and perseverance can also help you to build confidence and resilience.
How Do I Know Which Remorse Quotes To Choose?
Choose quotes that resonate with you and speak to your experiences.
You can also look for quotes that offer a new perspective on your situation or inspire you to make positive changes.
Take some time to reflect on what you need from a quote and what will be most helpful to you in your current situation.
Continue Reading????????: 123 Encouraging Positive Quotes To Radiate A Brighter Outlook
- 49 Unique Self-Care Kit Ideas For Your Well-Being - February 14, 2024
- 85 Exciting And Encouraging Quotes About Trying New Things In Life To Inspire That First Step - February 14, 2024
- 125 Inspiring You Are Amazing Quotes For Yourself And The Special People In Your Life - February 14, 2024
Related posts:
124 Fun And Feeling Soul Sisters Quotes
510 Of Paulo Coelho’s Most Influential Quotes To Achieve Your Dreams
132 Unique & Inspiring Florence Scovel Shinn’s Quotes
62 Pick Me Up Quotes For When You’re Feeling Down
468 Inspiring Quotes For Kids
60 Inspiring Quotes For Self-Compassion
108 Riveting October Quotes To Inspire You To Love The Beauty Of This Colorful Month
112 Illuminating Two-Faced People Quotes To Help You Recognize And Deal With Insincere People
