Meaning & Analysis
A decision made rashly leads to a long period of regret and reflection afterward.
Insights
Impulsive commitment
Highlights the danger of locking into choices under time-pressure or heat of emotion; snap resolutions mortgage the future for a fleeting present clarity.
Asymmetric time cost
Signals that minutes saved by rushing can expand into months or years of consequences—regret compounds while the initial ‘gain’ evaporates.
Moral patience
Advocates deliberation as a virtue: weighing reasons, seeking counsel, and resisting the vanity of decisiveness for its own sake.
Cognitive aftertaste
Implies that hurried choices invite rumination, second-guessing, and self-reproach—the psyche pays interest on impulsivity.
Fate of rash vows
Warns against irrevocable promises (contracts, oaths, marriages) made in haste; the proverb functions as a pre-commitment check.
Temporal irony
The speed of the decision contrasts with the slowness of regret. The saying dramatizes a human bias: we discount the future during action but over-attend to it afterward.
Classical kinship
Pairs with ‘festina lente’—make haste slowly—and with the cognate maxim ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ extending the caution from general resolution to life-bonding choices.
Legal and mercantile context
In early modern worlds of bonds, leases, and apprenticeships, a rash signature could bind one to years of obligation; the proverb is practical counsel for literate and illiterate alike.
Psychology of regret
Regret thrives when outcomes are controllable and alternatives imaginable. Hasty decisions amplify counterfactuals—‘if only I had paused’—fueling prolonged self-critique.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithetical parallelism
Balances ‘resolves in haste’ with ‘repents at leisure,’ sharpening the causal reversal and aiding recall.
Alliteration and rhythm
The h-/r- sounds and the two-beat cadence in each clause give the line a gavel-like authority suited to judgment maxims.
Temporal imagery
Contrasts compressed time (‘haste’) with dilated time (‘leisure’), turning chronology itself into the moral of the story.
Aphoristic brevity
Concise, declarative form condenses complex behavioral insight into a portable rule-of-thumb.
Transcription
Quotations
Hastynesse engendreth repentaunce.
Whan men doo thynges in a haste .. shortly after they do repent them.
He that needes will do a thing in hast, may afterward repent him-selfe at leysure.
Thinges dunne in haste Bringeth spedye Repentance.
Acts done in hast, by leisure are repented.
Who resolves rashly, repents leisurely.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.