Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this.

The line is commonly attributed to Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, spoken by Aeneas to his companions after extreme hardship at sea and the wrecking of their fleet. In the poem, the Trojan refugees—survivors of Troy’s fall—are struggling to found a new home under divine pressure and hostile fate. Aeneas, though himself anxious, adopts the role of leader and morale‑builder, urging endurance and framing present suffering as something that may later be recalled with a kind of hard-won satisfaction. The sentiment fits the Aeneid’s larger themes of exile, perseverance, and the transformation of trauma into founding memory.

The quote expresses a stoic, forward-looking consolation: pain is not denied, but placed within a longer horizon in which today’s distress may become tomorrow’s meaningful story. It suggests that endurance can transmute suffering into experience—something that, once survived, can be remembered with relief, pride, or even tenderness. In Virgilian terms, it also hints at the epic logic of destiny: trials are part of a larger arc whose purpose may only be visible in retrospect. The line has endured because it captures a universal psychological truth about resilience—how distance and survival can soften even bitter events into bearable memory.