Quotes & Sayings About Expectation And Disappointment

Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment. (Quoting an old adage) — Elizabeth Gilbert

Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?
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One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"? — Pascal Mercier

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment. — Samuel Johnson

Hope meets a dead end when the only chance in sight comes to naught. — Pawan Mishra

Trust, is the stone thrown into the sea, sinking deep in all its murkiness, unable to see what it once lived and believed to be a promise. — Anthony Liccione

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form. — Randall Jarrell

No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us. — Hannah Whitall Smith

Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth. — Idries Shah

If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state. — Cate Blanchett

Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand. — John Ortberg

Human being may fail you, but God will never forsake thee. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Disappointment, discouragement, and despair are nothing but the bitter fruit of an unfulfilled expectation allowed to live beyond its time. — Guy Finley

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments. — Victor Hugo

Hope is critical to both faith and charity. When disobedience, disappointment, and procrastination erode faith, hope is there to uphold our faith. When frustration and impatience challenge charity, hope braces our resolve and urges us to care for our fellowmen even without expectation of reward. The brighter our hope, the greater our faith. The stronger our hope, the purer our charity. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Eating at a new, highly recommended restaurant is like a Very Important Blind Date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists. — Stuart Stevens

How could I possibly NOT be disappointed by what I would find? Nothing had ever met my expectation, since nothing could compete with my doctoring imagination, my pathetic compulsion to make the world quanter, funnier, kinder, and more mysterious than it actually was. — Armistead Maupin

HOPE AND EXPECTATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING, THOUGH BOTH WILL LEAD TO DISAPPOINTMENT. EXIST IN THE MOMENT, ACCEPTING ALL THINGS AS THEY ARE, NOT AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM BE. — Mark T. Barnes

We go from disappointment to disappointment, from hope to denial, from expectation to surrender, as we grow older, thinking or coming to think that what was wrong was the wanting, so intense it hurt us, and believing or coming to believe that hope was our mistake and expectation our error, and that everything the more we want it the more difficult the having it seems to be. — Alfred Hayes

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable. — Michael Sandel

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious. — Italo Calvino

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation. — Eric Hoffer

I gather that the dopaminergic system in the reward centres of the brain respond even more vigorously to the expectation of reward than to reward itself. Hence, perhaps, the disappointment. — Semir Zeki

I still work that expectation/disappointment cycle all the time. I think it is part of the human nature and I think the most important thing is not to judge it. We are human and we do have expectations and a lot of our expectations are often not met. It is a process of learning how to be kind and compassionate and loving to ourselves when we don't get the things we want when people, circumstances, and opportunities don't match our expectations. — Agapi Stassinopoulos

The point of self-reflection is, foremost, to clarify and to find honesty. Self-reflection is the way to throw self-lies out and face the truth - however painful it might be to admit that you were wrong. We seek consistency in ourselves, and so when we are faced with inconsistency, we struggle to deny. Denial has no place in self-reflection, and so it is incumbent upon a person to admit his errors, to embrace them and to move along in a more positive direction. We can fool ourselves for all sorts of reasons. Mostly for the sake of our ego, of course, but sometimes, I now understand, because we are afraid. For sometimes we are afraid to hope, because hope breeds expectation, and expectation can lead to disappointment. And — R.A. Salvatore

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. — Samuel Johnson

Although all of us desire happiness, few of us reach that goal because of the seemingly endless cycle of expectation and disappointment. — Tarthang Tulku

Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality. — John C. Maxwell

In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment. — John Kenneth Galbraith

When someone focuses on the expectation of accolades rather than the enjoyment of the work process, that person is setting up himself for disappointment. — Steve Hickner