Expectations quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside expectations — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The choice is ours: we can keep on craving what we don't have, and so perpetuate our unhappiness, or we can adjust our attitude toward what we do have so that our expectations conform to our experience."
"When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community."
"To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again."
"Refuse to allow yourself to have low expectations about what you're capable of creating"
"Abraham Lincoln did not contend that his actions were immune from Congressional correction; on the contrary, he specifically said he was acting beyond the present provisions in the expectation that congress would retroactively approve, which they did. He did not say anything like Richard Nixon: if the president does it is legal."
"And what if thou, sweet May, hast known Mishap by worm and blight; If expectations newly blown Have perished in thy sight; If loves and joys, while up they sprung, Were caught as in a snare; Such is the lot of all the young, However bright and fair."
"The element of the unexpected and the unforeseeable is what gives some of its relish to life and saves us from falling into the mechanical thralldom of the logicians."
"Welcome to the U.S. Capitol: Watch for falling expectations."
"Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity."
"Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)."
"There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner."
"The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations."
"By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other."
"Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment."
"They whose activity of imagination is often shifting the scenes of expectation, are frequently subject to such sallies of caprice as make all their actions fortuitous, destroy the value of their friendship, obstruct the efficacy of their virtues, and set them below the meanest of those who persist in their resolutions, execute what they design, and perform what they have promised."
"We ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.-It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke."
"Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted; let me serve Thee with active zeal, humbled confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge."
"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism, and I have a communications degree. I studied journalism -- who, what, where, when, and why -- of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us."
"I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish."
"Crackpot is an excellent job because the expectations are so low. No one ever tells crackpots that they should be doing more."
