158 Quotes About Remorse

Je ne suis pas sûr d'avoir jamais éprouvé ce qu'on appelle le remords, mais si quelque chose s'en approche, c'est bien la pensée d'avoir côtoyé vingt ans ce chagrin sans le reconnaître.

On n'empêche pas plus la pansée de revenir à une idée que la mer de revenir à un rivage. Pour le matelot, cela s'appelle la marée; pour le coupable, cela s'appelle le remords. Dieu soulève l'âme comme l'océan.

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 wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in the excess of grief.

I preach best from a point of penance.

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.

How could he have abandoned—no, shoved away the most important person in the world to him? The one person in the world to whom he, in turn, was also most important? God, he was a monster.

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.

He was the person all of us should be, but most of us aren't. And if I could have taken his place to buy him a little more time in the world, I'd have done it. I'm sorry I couldn't.