Expectations Quotes

“Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.”
― Ronnie Oldham

“We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.”
― Lev Grossman

“What's the first sign of a lurking, hidden expectation you didn't know you had? Pain! People don't do what we want, things don't happen quickly enough, the weather doesn't cooperate, our bodies don't cooperate. Why are these moments so painful? Because our minds are focused on a static, unchanging, me-centric picture while the dynamic unfolding of a broader life continues around us. There is nothing wrong with expectations per se, as it's appropriate to set goals and work, properly, towards their fruition. But the instant we feel pain over life not going "my way," our expectations have clearly taken an improper turn. Any moment you feel resistance or pain, look for -- and then let go of -- the hidden expectation. Practice giving yourself over to what "you" don't want. Let the line at the store be long. Let the other person interrupt you. Let the nervousness make you shake. Be where your body is, not where your mind is trying to take you.”
― Guy Finley

“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“You don't seem mad at all,' she said.

But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It is easier to make our wishes conform to our means than to make our means conform to our wishes.”
― Robert E. Lee

“I had read on the face of surroundings; some broken, some disconnected, some cracked expectations.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“The fruit of empty hopes is more bitter than the saddest truth.”
― Angel Wagenstein, Isaac's Torah: A Novel

“Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world.

1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized.

2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce.

3.He married his cousin.

4.He had an estranged relationship with his son.

5. He had his first child out of wedlock.

6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people.

7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Always be realistic with your expectations.
Too much expectation
can only lead to frustration.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Most sane human beings who are over the age of six usually act or react not as per what they genuinely feel or really think but in accordance with the expectations of those around them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“You can devise all the plans in the world, but if you don’t welcome spontaneity; you will just disappoint yourself.”
― Abigail Biddinger

“One always expects something else.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph

“Do you know that pain of leaving when you look back expecting to see a face waving goodbye at you but all you see is a dark abandoned corner?

There won't be any reason to return then.

All you can do is look ahead and not to stumble and fall on the pit ahead waiting for you.”
― Sanhita Baruah

“To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth.

There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure of all is not the enjoyment of my company - why - it will be the worse for him - that's all.'

'If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must, indeed, be careful whom you marry - or rather, you must avoid it altogether.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, ‘Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved.’ I can’t possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone’s expectations of me are.”
― Emma Watson

“What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Don't force people to live up to your dreams of who they might be.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!”
― Georgette Heyer, Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle

“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
― Mark Twain

“The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"