Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.
Opportunity is lost by deliberation.
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 never had the chance to consider what or how I wanted to be.
If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'
We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.
It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.
Through indecision opportunity is often lost.
One of the worst mistakes is to do nothing.
The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
I was recruited by every school in the country for football and basketball. And an incident happened in high school, and all that was taken away. No other teams, no other schools were recruiting me anymore.
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts.
I failed myself when I ruined a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be Robert Griffin III's running mate during his Heisman Trophy-winning season at Baylor.
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.
I didn't know a thing about Oxford and had never been to Britain. My father suggested it because in 1939 he had been about to take up a place at Wadham College, but the war broke out, and he joined the Army instead.
An emotion that lives with me is a sense of 'what might have been' had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.
History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.
Regrets are born of paths never taken.
I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!
The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
For a lot of different reasons I didn't fulfil my potential.
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Often when we realize how precious those seconds are, it's too late for them to be captured because the moment has passed. We realize too late.
