Regrets

[Elstir to Marcel:] “There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations, by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.”
--Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 605 (Kilmartin/Enright transl.)