“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now
Source: If You Could See Me Now
"La dernière chose que nous attendions de vous, Général, est une leçon de géométrie !"
Laplace to Napoléon, after the latter had reported on some new elementary geometry results[citation needed]
“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now
Source: If You Could See Me Now
“I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”
George Meredith book The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
Source: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4412/4412.txt (1859), Ch. 1.
“A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist
"Technical Education" (1877) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/TechEd.html <br class="br">1870s
“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Book 2, chapter 4. Compare: "I say the very things that make the greatest Stir / An' the most interestin' things, are things that did n't occur", Sam Walter Foss, Things that did n't occur.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Henrietta Temple (1837)
Dana Reeve (1961–2006) Actress, singer, activist
Middlebury College Address (2004)
Context: Be brave. Be open-minded. Be kind. Be forgiving. Be generous. Be optimistic. Be grateful for the many unexpected lessons you will learn. Find the joy inside the hardship. It’s there. I assure you. And, too, be open to inspiration from unlikely sources.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer
“They do.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Ged and Arren)
John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States
Comments made to General Richard Myers in U.S. Senate hearings into the Iraq War http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec05/hearings_9-29.html (29 September 2005) <br class="br">2000s, 2005