Daily Inspiration Quote by Virgil Thomson

Thomson’s line has the clipped confidence of someone who spent a lifetime in rooms where taste gets argued into existence. “I don’t go around regretting things that don’t happen” isn’t a self-help mantra; it’s a compositional ethic disguised as a shrug. Regret, in this framing, is wasted energy unless it’s tethered to an actual event, an actual note played wrong, an actual decision made. Everything else is fantasy management.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the romantic myth of the tortured artist. Thomson, who helped define an American musical voice while skewering pretension as a critic, understood that careers are built on choices, not hypotheticals. The alternative lives we narrate - the commission that might’ve arrived, the premiere that could’ve changed everything - are seductive because they let us feel profound without doing anything. He refuses that melodrama. His syntax does the work: “go around” makes regret sound like idle wandering, a kind of emotional loitering.

Context matters: Thomson came up alongside modernists and expatriates, amid constant gatekeeping about what counted as “serious” music. To avoid regretting what “doesn’t happen” is also to reject the prestige economy’s favorite weapon: making artists mourn the approvals they never got. It’s pragmatic, but not cold. It’s a defense of attention. Spend it on the music you can actually write, the performances you can actually shape, the relationships you can actually keep. Everything else is noise.