"I've suffered a great many catastrophies in my life. Most of them never happened."
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them." -- Josh Billings
"There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality." -- Seneca
"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."
- Michel de Montaigne