quotations about expectations
People live up to your expectations, not their potential.
STEPHEN YOUNG
Micro Messaging: Why Great Leadership is Beyond Words
What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be.
ANONYMOUS
Sometimes the unexpected happens when you don't expect a person to come up to expectations.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Can we remember when, in those more tender years--before our sense of wonder was either crushed, or brushed away by a world rushing by--how alive we were with a bare longing to know life by itself? How life's mysteries held no fear for us, but rather filled us with expectations ... so much so that some nights it was hard to fall asleep; or we'd spend the night actively dreaming of all the possibilities life seemed to offer? Can we look back on ourselves when we were like this and recall when our hearts and minds were still wide open; how intrigued we were by the world unfolding around us, even as we were awakening to an exploding universe of feelings welling up within us?
GUY FINLEY
Let Go and Live in the Now
I know not anything 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
The Life of Samuel Johnson
For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?
KIJ JOHNSON
The Fox Woman
These expectations are like a drumbeat in the background--after a while, you don't even consciously hear it, but you are nonetheless walking in step with the beat.
SUSAN NOLEN-HOEKSEMA
Eating, Drinking, Overthinking
Do a little more every day than you are expected to do, and soon you will be expected to do more.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
In our pursuit of the things of this world, we usually prevent enjoyment by expectation; we anticipate our own happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness and worldly pleasures by delightful forethoughts of them; so that when we come to possess them, they do not answer the expectation, nor satisfy the desires which were raised about them, and they vanish into nothing.
JOHN TILLOTSON
"The Resurrection of our Savior Consider'd, as an Argument for Seeking Things Above", The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson
I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed.
L. M. MONTGOMERY
Anne of Green Gables
I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
BRUCE LEE
attributed, The Bruce Lee Story
We ought not to speculate on the future as if it were already past, nor build expectations on events which may eventually turn out very differently from what they seemed at first to promise.
POLYBIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
You are your own worst enemy. If you can learn to stop expecting impossible perfection, in yourself and others, you may find the happiness that has always eluded you.
LISA KLEYPAS
Love in the Afternoon
There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
JODI PICOULT
Nineteen Minutes
High expectations are the key to everything.
MICHAEL BERGDAHL
High Expectations are the Key to Everything
Expectation ends only in heaven.
KENTIJERN
attributed, Day's Collacon
In expectation there is happiness.
SHI-KA-SHIU
attributed, Day's Collacon
If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected -- an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Housekeeping
Maybe she should stop reading those damn romance novels. They were giving her crazy expectations.
LEXI BLAKE
A Dom is Forever
Role expectations are like social recipes that enable us to cook up a number of social interactions with relative ease, rather than having to produce a newly created social behavior each time.
CAROLINE HODGES PERSELL
Understanding Society