A quibble with a quote

A relatively new friend shared a quote attributed to George Eliot - and I must be nearly illiterate to have not remembered who she was - in a post on FB, with which I must quibble:

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

It turns out to be a misquote, at best, and I've read enough of her biography to not take her as a moral mentor, but neither of those things represent my quibble. After all, this so much depends on what you think you might have been! There are things I thought I might have been that will never be available to me, because of decisions I have made along the way and circumstances beyond my control.

Many of those things are no great loss, and others are quite a great loss indeed. When people talk about living your life without regret, my internal response is always an acknowledgement that the best for which I can hope is to avoid fresh cause for it.

But I would agree that it is never to late to be what you might be, or even what you are meant to be. And the far greater tragedy of many lives is that we fail to seek a vision for what we might be because we are too busy lamenting the loss of what we might have been.