Some people are never given a second chance. Here are some missed opportunity quotes that inspire you to keep looking for new chances.
When one thinks of missed opportunities, they usually think about things that could have been if only they had done something different. But what about the times when we miss out on opportunities because we don’t take the first step? We’re too busy chasing our goals to see what’s in front of us. But sometimes, the opportunity is right in front of us and we just don’t see it.
Whether it’s a job opportunity that we pass up or a relationship that we shy away from, these are the moments when our dreams and hopes fall by the wayside. Here are some memorable missed opportunity quotes that you may want to consider:
Missed opportunity quotes
Life is full of opportunities that are missed because we don’t take the time to explore them. Here are ten missed opportunity quotes that make you regret not taking the chance:
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories.
Haruki Murakami
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
Eric Roth
I don’t feel a yearning or a sense of missed opportunities. I don’t have many regrets. So that’s a nice feeling. To have no regrets and still have enough sense of adventure to take on risk.
Michael J. Fox
When you experience a failure as a leader, don’t hide it – talk about it. Your missed opportunity will encourage others to take risks.
Naveen Jain
Don’t be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.
Lily Tomlin
Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.
Jodi Picoult
While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity.
Publilius Syrus
Each minute we spend worrying about the future and regretting the past is a minute we miss in our appointment with life – a missed opportunity to engage life and to see that each moment gives us the chance to change for the better, to experience peace and joy.
Nhat Hanh
While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin. The opportunity is lost.
Quintilian
A good opportunity is seldom presented, and is easily lost.
Publilius Syrus
Outrageous missed opportunity quotes
When it comes to life, there are always opportunities that are missed. Whether it’s because we’re not paying attention or we don’t take the opportunity when it arises, we often miss out on some great things. Here are some missed opportunity quotes that will remind you to never lose hope:
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.
Jerome K. Jerome
Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide.
Bertie Ahern
All my life, she thought, I have let things pass me by.
Penelope Lively
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston S. Churchill
We all have neglected opportunities to deplore.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Your belly may be empty and opportunities flicker dimly, but let your cheeks glow fat with the fortune of life.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Most people miss opportunity because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are no lost opportunities in Divine Mind, as one door shuts another door is opened.
Florence Scovel Shinn
Quotes about missed opportunity
Everyone has had moments where they feel like they have missed an opportunity. Maybe you felt like you could have done better if you had only taken that chance. Regardless of the reason, these missed opportunity quotes that will change your perspective of life.
My mantra: Brainless exercise is a lost opportunity for improvement.
Michael Merzenich
I think I could look back through the past few years at missed opportunities and stuff, but one thing I have learned is not to dwell on missed chances or times where you have failed.
Michael Chang
It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.
Antoine de Saint–Exupery
Don’t allow missed opportunities of the past interfere with the opportunities that are right before you.
Ryan Robbins
That was the missed moment. I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said, “Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I’m here. Ask me before it’s too late.
J.L. Carr
An opportunity is like a train on the move. Once its doors have closed, it’s gone. But do stick around, another one will surely be on its way; carrying with it better opportunities.
Naide P Obiang
We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare
Resisted temptations become lost opportunities.
Margaret Ayer Barnes
We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.
Zygmunt Bauman
Missed opportunity quotes on life
Sometime people miss out on life because they don’t believe in themselves or their dreams. If you’re feeling like you’re stuck in a rut and your life isn’t going the way you want it to, here are ten insightful missed opportunity quotes that will help you reshape your life:
Most of us miss our best opportunities in life because they come to us disguised as work.
Nido R Qubein
I’m a dreamer. I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.
Mike Tyson
I have never once regretted missing a business opportunity so that I could be with my children and grandchildren.
Mitt Romney
Four things come not back: The spoken word, The sped arrow, The past life, The neglected opportunity.
Arabian Proverb
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
Marcel Proust
Opportunity is missed by people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison
Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you’ll never manage to button up.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Our fears can cause us to miss out on a lot of experiences and golden opportunities. Don’t let your fears rob you of your life.
James Van Praagh
Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else becomes eerily easy.
Douglas Adams
Inspirational missed opportunity quotes
The missed opportunity quotes could have changed a person’s life for the better. Some of these may seem like small things, but if taken advantage of, they could lead to big changes.
Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
Haruki Murakami
Our priorities are most visible in how we use our time. Someone has said, “Three things never come back–the spent arrow, the spoken word, and the lost opportunity.”
Dallin H. Oaks
We cannot recycle or save the time allotted to us each day. With time, we have only one opportunity for choice, and then it is gone forever.
Dallin H. Oaks
My greatest talent is calmness and being positive. I concentrate on what you can do even in the worst of times. You don’t judge by last week’s errors or lost opportunity.
Joe Torre
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.
Ann Landers
When the man is traveling with a man, he says, “Let’s stay up late and work on this and get this to be better.” When the man’s traveling with the woman, for the sake of appearances he doesn’t do the work with her. That’s a lost opportunity for her to be a success.
Sheryl Sandberg
I’ve learned that opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.
Andy Rooney
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.
Roger Ebert
We’ve all got a black book of missed opportunities.
Jim Broadbent
Lost opportunity quotes
It is not only our actions that make a difference in the world, but also our inaction. Many people often take opportunities to do good without actually doing anything. These missed opportunity quotes remind us of the importance of taking action:
I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.
Helen Keller
The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word “crisis.” One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.
Richard M. Nixon
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Opportunity is a bird that never perches.
Claude Maxwell MacDonald
What is left unsaid gets in the way of the relationship. What is left unasked–for is a missed opportunity.
Thomas Leonard
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
Permissiveness, immorality, pornography, drugs, the power of peer pressure–all these and more–cause many to be tossed about on a sea of sin and crushed on the jagged reefs of lost opportunities, forfeited blessings, and shattered dreams.
Thomas S. Monson
Failure, then, failure! So the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation.
William James
When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end.
Sloane Crosley
I never really look at life and worry about missed opportunities.
Clive Owen
Missing opportunity quotes
Do not miss a single chance – not one single opportunity – to tell someone how wonderful they are, how special they are, how important to you they are, how incredible as a person they are, how beautiful they are inside and out. Do not miss a single opening in which to insert such a comment, genuinely felt and genuinely meant.
Neale Donald Walsch
Life is short. Don’t miss opportunities to spend time with the people that you love.
Joel Osteen
Opportunity is often missed because we are broadcasting when we should be tuning in.
Orison Swett Marden
Don’t spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, that you miss the right opportunity.
Michael Dell
Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life. If we do not pay attention to these events, we can easily miss the opportunities.
Jim Rohn
If you don’t pay attention and if your imagination isn’t pretty much engaged, you’re going to miss things and you’re going to miss opportunities for it to be as compelling and as creepy as it can be.
Bruce Greenwood
Opportunities are often missed because we are broadcasting when we should be listening.
Anonymous
It is all very well to be cautious, but if we are too cautious we will miss our opportunity.
Yoshijiro Umezu
Don’t be so defensive and afraid to be proven wrong that you miss the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Many people miss opportunity because it came disguised in overalls.
Henry Ford
Final thought
These missed opportunity quotes are a reminder that we need to be more mindful of the ways in which we interact with others. Each interaction can lead to future opportunities, and it is important to take advantage of every opportunity that comes our way.
We must remember that missed opportunities are the seeds of regret. While it may be tempting to take shortcuts or take the easy way out, taking the time to do things right will result in a more rewarding future.
Hope you enjoyed our collection of missed opportunity quotes. Life can be full of opportunities that we miss out on because we’re too busy being busy. So, don’t miss your chance – seize opportunity by the horns and go for it!