Source identified
“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.”
Voice: Fictional character · Edward Rochester
Rochester describes remorse as corrosive because wrongdoing can continue to poison later life; the scene immediately turns to the harder question of whether repentance or actual reformation can change what follows.
Source note: Jane Eyre, Project Gutenberg #1260. Rochester says this to Jane while recounting his own decline. Jane replies that repentance is said to cure remorse; Rochester answers that reformation may be its cure. This is fictional character dialogue, not Charlotte Brontë’s direct psychological advice.
Source identified
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
The epigram turns a flattering word into a comic rebrand for error, suggesting that experience often arrives only after something has gone wrong.
Source note: Lady Windermere’s Fan; a characteristic Wildean epigram linking experience and mistakes.
Source identified
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.”
Failure can expose what does not work and force closer observation, turning setbacks into information that uncomplicated success may never reveal.
Source note: Self-Help, Chapter XI, “Self-Culture—Facilities and Difficulties,” Project Gutenberg #935. The passage follows Charles James Fox’s contrast between early success and perseverance after failure, then leads into examples of discoveries and learning produced through mistakes and failed attempts.
Source identified
“Misfortunes springing from ourselves are the hardest to bear.”
Harm is especially painful when our own choices, tools, or contributions helped create the conditions that made the loss possible.
Source note: Moral printed after “The Oak and the Woodcutters”; the oak laments wedges made from its own branches.
Source identified
“It is not a lost year, but one that may prove the most helpful of any you ever know.”
Voice: Fictional character · Jo Bhaer
A painful or disappointing period can still become useful experience when it changes judgment, humility, resolve, and the way a person begins again.
Source note: Jo's Boys; the reassurance follows a setback and reframes a difficult year as experience that may later prove unusually helpful rather than simply wasted time.
Source identified
“To have faults and not to reform them,—this, indeed, should be pronounced having faults.”
Making an error is less serious than refusing to correct it after the problem has become visible.
Source note: The Analects of Confucius, James Legge’s public-domain English translation; Book XV distinguishes ordinary faults from the refusal to reform them.