APAD: The triumph of hope over experience

Meaning:

   A literal view of the subject of remarriage.

 

Background:

   This remark is reported to have been said by Samuel Johnson in James

   Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791. The occasion was Johnson's hearing of

   a man who had remarried soon after the death of a wife to whom he had been

   unhappily married.

 

- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]

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Johnson voiced no judgment despite of knowing of the man's previous unhappy

marriage. Had the guy bailed out just before taking the plunge, as the character

Charles did in the film "Four Weddings and A Funeral," the sage lexicographer

would say experience knocked out hope in the last round.