Did Lewis Carroll say this (or something similar)?

August 25, 2016 10:39 AM

I'm trying to source the quote "In the end, we only regret the changes we didn't take." The Internet says Lewis Carroll, but there's no citation on any page that attributes it to him, and it's not in Bartlett's Familiar. Can someone tell me if he wrote this, or something similar (and where)? I get the feeling this is another case of the fake quote attribution syndrome that proliferates online, but I'd like to be sure. Thanks.
posted by dortmunder to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

I think you mean "...the chances we didn't take," and I assure you it's not by Lewis Carroll, or (almost certainly) by any Victorian (it gets no 19th-century hits on Google Books, and it's not in the style of the period). It has the strong ring of a late-20th-century Hallmark-style saying, the kind routinely attributed to whatever Great Name comes most readily to mind.
posted by languagehat at 11:08 AM on August 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: I did mean chances.
posted by dortmunder at 11:16 AM on August 25, 2016

Seconding LanguageHat. It doesn't appear online at all until around 2000, and then it's attributed to "unknown". The Lewis Carroll attribution came later.
posted by brainmouse at 11:16 AM on August 25, 2016

Incidentally, it seems to get tacked on to another quote: "There comes a point in your life when you realize who matters, who never did, who won’t anymore, and who always will. So don’t worry about people from your past, there’s a reason they didn’t make it to your future." which usually gets attributed to a mid-1800s Australian poet named Adam Lindsay Gordon, but I searched some full text of his writings and as far as I can tell that attribution is false too (and it really doesn't match the language of his writing, but even like... "translated" to modern English it's not in there).
posted by brainmouse at 11:28 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Like everyone else is saying, this doesn't sound at all like Carroll or any Victorian. (I'm not scholar but just did a ton of research into Carroll for a fiction project.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:57 AM on August 25, 2016

I haven't had any luck tracking down a source, but I've seen something similar attributed to actor Zachary Scott (perhaps in a film role?): “As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.” Never with a solid citation to an actual source, however.

Your quote reminds me more closely of a similar Hallmark-style aphorism I've seen, which runs something like "The only things you regret in life are the risks you didn't take." Perhaps you would have luck searching for other, similar variants?

(As an aside, I first ran across this one in my ethnographic fieldsite, where it was emblazoned, rather alarmingly, on a long-distance, shared minibus taxi of the type notorious for poor maintenance, reckless driving, and fiery wrecks.)
posted by col_pogo at 3:09 PM on August 25, 2016