When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.

The line is a wry reflection on anticipatory anxiety: people often suffer more from imagined futures than from events that actually occur. By framing it as a deathbed recollection, the anecdote compresses a lifetime into a moral—worry can become a kind of self-inflicted hardship, retrospectively revealed as needless. The humor (“most of which had never happened”) sharpens the lesson without moralizing, suggesting a stoic or pragmatic stance: attend to real problems as they arise, but resist rehearsing catastrophes in advance. The quote’s enduring appeal lies in how it validates fear while gently exposing its tendency to fabricate burdens.

1) “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
2) “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
3) “I have had a great many troubles in my life, and most of them never happened.”