Francesco Guicciardini Quotes

How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.

Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty.

It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house. It's really, really true. A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives.

I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure.

Don't regret the past or fear the future. Both bring misery through self-doubt.

of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

Do you know what happens when you always look before you leap?" She reached out and touched his hand before hurrying toward the door. "You hardly ever make the jump.

There's nothing as scary as the future.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Worry is a down payment on a problem you may never have

The business of life is to go forward; he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way, and he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow.

I don't want to go to the future. I'm scared of the future!

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

None wise dares hopeless venture.

There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.

It's better sometimes when we don't get to touch our dreams.

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with. . . .

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.