Expectations quotes
1.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside expectations — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations."
"You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations."
"Base your happiness on being real, not on illusions and expectations."
"I have absolutely no plans and no expectations of ever being a candidate again."
"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."
"Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are among humanity's most pressing concerns. Societal expectations on climate change are real, and our industry is expected to take a leadership role."
"Promising is the very air o' the time; it opens the eyes of expectation."
"We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph."
"Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience."
"An expectation is a future object, recognised as belonging to me."
"The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another."
"Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them."
"He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation."
"I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going to disappear off the scene pretty quickly."
"Happiness is found in the absence of expectation and a continuous focus on appreciation."
"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."
"Excellence isn’t about meeting the spec, it’s about setting the spec. It defines what the consumer sees as quality right this minute, and tomorrow, if you’re good, you’ll reset that expectation again"
"Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations."
"The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life."
"Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life."
