“A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings. Of this awful truth no person has lived to my age without seeing abundant proof.”

—  George Mason

Letter to his daughter Sarah Mason McCarty after the death of an infand daughter (10 February 1785), published in The Life of George Mason, 1725-1792 Vol. 2 (1892) by Kate Mason Rowland, p. 74
Context: A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings. Of this awful truth no person has lived to my age without seeing abundant proof. Your dear baby has died innocent and blameless, and has been called away by an all wise and merciful Creator, most probably from a life of misery and misfortune, and most certainly to one of happiness and bliss.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest …" by George Mason?
George Mason photo
George Mason54
American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional … 1725–1792

Related quotes

Paulo Coelho photo

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”

Caleb Carr (1955) Novelist, screenwriter, military historian

Paulo Coelho photo

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 18.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liberty, it will have inflicted the greatest blow on the system of free popular government that has ever been inflicted. Here we have”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liberty, it will have inflicted the greatest blow on the system of free popular government that has ever been inflicted. Here we have had a virgin continent on which to try the experiment of making out of divers race stocks a new nation and of treating all the citizens of that nation in such a fashion as to preserve them equality of opportunity in industrial, civil, and political life. Our duty is to secure each man against any injustice by his fellows.

Walter Rauschenbusch photo

“In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Introduction, p.xv

Stendhal photo

“Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.”

Stendhal (1783–1842) French writer

Journal entry (10 December 1801)
Context: Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.

Stanley Baldwin photo

“…that very loyalty to the past with its dream of beauty and with its real hardness and hardships. These things save us from what is the greatest peril of our age, the peril of materialism…. The struggle against materialism in the hearts of our people is one of the greatest struggles of this age.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech upon receiving the Freedom of the Burgh of Inverness, Scotland (13 June 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 191-192.
1930

Václav Havel photo

“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 4 : Public Enemy

Frederic G. Kenyon photo

“It is a fascinating story to those who care for their Bible. It is the life-history of the greatest of books, diversified by interesting episodes which appeal to our human sympathies; and we venture to think that the result is reassuring. It may be disturbing to some to part with the conception of a Bible handed down through the ages without alteration and in unchallenged authority; but it is a higher ideal to face the facts, to apply the best powers with which God has endowed us to the solutions of the problems which they present to us; and it reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scripture, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 144

“We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds—either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” pp. 7-8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Related topics