#expectations

"There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations"

"Always expect that something beautiful and wonderful will happen to fill life with beauty."

"When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."

"Would you like to know your future?If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise."

"My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."[The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]"

"Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed."

"Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life..."

"I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep my expectations."

"You don't seem mad at all,' she said.But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?"

"When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood."

"When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are."

"A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect."

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is... we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity."

"The fruit of empty hopes is more bitter than the saddest truth."

"It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished."

"The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them."

"Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it."

"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

"To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect"

"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle."