Expectation Quotes

We tend to live up to our expectations.

Earl Nightingale

What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens.

Benjamin Disraeli

Don't count your chickens before they are hatched.

Aesop

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

Samuel Johnson, J. Boswell The L

For, he that expects nothing shall not be disappointed, but he that expects much -- if he lives and uses that in hand day by day -- shall be full to running over.

Edgar Cayce

The idea that positive illusions are in the service of sef-esteem virtually requires that they stay in check. If one develops substantially unrealistic expectations regarding the future that greatly exceed what one is actually able to accomplish, then one is set up for failure and disappointment, leading to lower self-esteem.

Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illu

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Charlotte Bronte

Death affords those who are left an opportunity to reevaluate everything. And though we would give all we have to defer that opportunity, it exists anyway. It allows us to see the flimsiness of our expectations, to realize there is not expectation without disappointment; it allows us the possibility to being more sensitive, more vulnerable, to let others support us, and to notice the integrity and love often left unobserved in life's fast pace. Mainly, it gives us the chance to live life in the present.

Joan Bordow, The Ultimate Loss

'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear;Heaven were not Heaven, if we knew what it were.

Sir John Suckling, Against Fruit

I would not anticipate the relish of any happiness, nor feel the weight of any misery, before it actually arrives.

Anon., Unattributed Author, Spec

Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect.

Margaret Mitchell

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Samuel Johnson, Letter to Bennet

Everything comes if a man will only wait.

Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (bk.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft thereWhere most it promises; and oft it hitsWhere hope is coldest, and despair most fits.

William Shakespeare, All's Well

Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations.

Richard M. DeVos

Don't cross the bridge till you come to it.

Proverb

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation

Samuel Johnson

Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be, like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck.

Claud Cockburn

If you expect nothing, you're apt to be surprised. You'll get it.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Of if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

Stephen King