Explore Quotes on Expectations

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

Always do one thing less than you think you can do.

We don't always know what makes us happy. We know, instead, what we think SHOULD. We are baffled and confused when our attempts at happiness fail...We are mute when it comes to naming accurately our own preferences, delights, gifts, talents. The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people's expectations. The tongue of the original self is the language of the heart.

Like strength is felt from hope, and from despair.

Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't heaven, so don't expect it to be.

When your love is pure or spiritual, there is no demand, no expectation. There is only the sweetest feeling of spontaneous oneness with the human being or beings concerned.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

So, the next time you're out working on your game and they pass you the rock, don't just take it to the hole. Take it to the next level. Don't just bend rims. Bend expectations. Let them see you and feel you and by the very virtue of your love, the truth in your game, they will hear you. Let your game speak.

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

I was raised, myself, by extremely strict but also extremely loving Chinese immigrant parents. To this day, I believe that their having high expectations for me, coupled with love, was the greatest gift that anyone's ever given me. And so that's why, even though my husband is not Chinese, I try to raise my own two daughters the same way.

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.

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.

Without life there can be no action — no objects of pursuit — no restless desires — no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it — that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgement.

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.

Hope is a prodigal young heir, and experience is his banker.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

Unto him who is able to keep us from falling, and lift us from the dark to the bright mountain of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy, to him be power and authority for ever and ever.

Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.