Peter Abrahams Quotes

I look back upon my times when more people were listening to what I had to say, and I didn't say enough.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

Life comes in the form of opportunities, which are easy to recognize, after they have been wasted.

I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.

When I left, I had learnt nothing. I took nothing with me. At least, that's what I thought then.

I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.

I can't believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can't believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

If I would have had the same opportunities when I was 22, there's a good chance I would have squandered them. I know my work wouldn't have been any good.

I feel like I wasted my time in my twenties. When you are beginning to realise your potential you wish you'd realized it earlier.

I don't want to be one of those could have, would have, should have kind of guys.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

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.

It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.

I learned from my past.

Sometimes we question things that we have done in our lives but how many times do we question what we haven't done in someone else's.

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?