Existential Regret Quotes

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.

Don't waste your death on a half assed life

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

Hoc solum deliqui, quod uiuo. My only fault is that I am alive.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!

When you find your authentic self, your identity - your true identity - how many people work a job they hate or live a life, they're going oh my gosh.