
“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
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]
La dernière chose que nous attendions de vous, Général, est une leçon de géométrie !
“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
Source: If You Could See Me Now
“I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”
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.”
"Technical Education" (1877) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/TechEd.html
1870s
“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”
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)
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.
“They do.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Ged and Arren)
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)
2000s, 2005