Lost Opportunities Quotes

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!”
― John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller

“Don't cry over the shots you've missed; weep over the ones you've not taken at all. The bitterest regrets are for things planned but left undone!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365

“We yearn for opportunities, we pray for opportunities and we seek for opportunities. The good news is that we meet opportunities. The bad news is that we miss the opportunities only to come to a later realization of missed opportunities.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth;
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole

“Opportunity (from Machiavelli)

"But who art thou, with curious beauty graced,
O woman, stamped with some bright heavenly seal
Why go thy feet on wings, and in such haste?"

"I am that maid whose secret few may steal,
Called Opportunity. I hasten by
Because my feet are treading on a wheel,

Being more swift to run than birds to fly.
And rightly on my feet my wings I wear,
To blind the sight of those who track and spy;

Rightly in front I hold my scattered hair
To veil my face, and down my breast to fall,
Lest men should know my name when I am there;

And leave behind my back no wisp at all
For eager folk to clutch, what time I glide
So near, and turn, and pass beyond recall."

"Tell me; who is that Figure at thy side?"
"Penitence. Mark this well that by decree
Who lets me go must keep her for his bride.

And thou hast spent much time in talk with me
Busied with thoughts and fancies vainly grand,
Nor hast remarked, O fool, neither dost see
How lightly I have fled beneath thy hand.”
― James Elroy Flecker, Forty-Two Poems

“Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.”
― James Richardson, By the Numbers

“For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity.
…
But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.”
― Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband

“Castles in the Air

My thoughts by night are often filled
With visions false as fair:
For in the past alone I build
My castles in the air.

I dwell not now on what may be:
Night shadows o'er the scene:
But still my fancy wanders free
Through that which might have been.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Delphi Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock (Illustrated)

“It never came down to two roads at all,
or if it did, I took the one less traveled by
for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall,
or it slipped past like a station off the air
while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.”
― James Richardson, By the Numbers