Noel Coward Quotes

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

I do wish that I had gone to college, just for the simple fact that knowing more than one approach makes you more well-rounded. But I still can't say knowing what I know now, that I would have done it any differently.

Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

I dropped out of college in Hawaii just because I thought school was for losers. But school's really important.

When you look back on anything in life, hindsight being 20/20, some things you'd like to have done a little differently.

A profound knowledge of life is the least enviable of all species of knowledge, because it can only be acquired by trials that make us regret the loss of our ignorance.

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we're all going, "God, what a jerk I've been," "How could I have married that guy?" or "How could I have done this or that?" With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, "It wasn't all about them."

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

I'm older, and I wish that a lot of things that I did in my life, I didn't do, but I'm able to talk about it.

I don't really regret much. I know there are things that I've done that have been wrong, and wish I could do over again, but I feel it's all made me who I am today, and I'm very thankful for that.

But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

This is a bad story.” “Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.” “No, you should,” I say. “But—” “I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

I'm definitely happy with everything I've done. I stand behind it. You'll always be saying, "Well, I could change that, or I would do that differently." But you have to let it be what it is.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?

How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said.

Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

I certainly wished I hadn't stressed quite as much or had such insecurity at times. I wish I had trusted my instincts on some occasions when I didn't and I wish I had listened to better advice when I didn't. But overall, I have to look at the glass as half full and acknowledge that I am all of the moments of my life, the good and the not so good.