Source identified
“I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.”
Voice: Fictional narrator · Pip
Pip recognizes that his changed ambitions separated him from a simpler life he now sees could have been better, yet he also acknowledges that the lost path cannot simply be restored by wishing.
Source note: Great Expectations, Project Gutenberg #1400. Pip says this to Biddy after admitting that settling at the forge with Joe—and perhaps eventually with Biddy—might have made him a different and better-satisfied person. The line is Pip’s fictional first-person speech.
Source identified
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
Voice: Fictional character · King Richard II
Time ignored earlier becomes painfully visible later, when opportunities narrow and delay can no longer be recovered.
Source note: Richard II, Act 5, Scene 5.
Source identified
“In a world where all is fleeting, change alone endures.”
Stability is temporary, so practical judgment requires expecting change rather than treating present arrangements as permanent.
Source note: Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation, in a discussion of fortune and apparent stability.
Source identified
“We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves.”
Private expectations can exceed what anyone else demands of us, so a life may feel disappointing chiefly by comparison with unfulfilled plans known only to oneself.
Source note: The Idler, No. 88; the surrounding paragraph concerns private hopes, proposed tasks and the gap between imagined achievement and lived action.
Source identified
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!””
Voice: Poetic speaker · Narrator of “Maud Muller”
Whittier compresses regret into the imagined alternative life: both Maud and the Judge later measure their ordinary lives against a possibility neither chose when they briefly met.
Source note: “Maud Muller,” in The Works of Whittier, Volume I, Project Gutenberg #9567. The poem first shows both characters imagining the life they might have shared, then calls “It might have been” the saddest formulation before ending with a separate note of hope.
Source identified
“Right occasion and opportunity have their privileges, and often hold out to ordinary folk what they deny to kings.”
Montaigne observes that access and success do not follow rank mechanically: timing, circumstance and temperament can open an ordinary person’s path even when status or power fails to secure the same result.
Source note: The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy, Volume II, entry for March 6, 1581 during his visit to the Vatican Library, W. G. Waters translation, Project Gutenberg #70839. The sentence follows Montaigne’s surprise that he gained access where the French ambassador had failed; it is first-person journal reflection, not a general law that opportunity always defeats privilege.