Quotes & Sayings About Expectation Vs Reality

One of my principal concerns is the contradiction between appearance and reality - illusion and reality. I try to set up an expectation of sorts and then contradict it. — Stuart Pearson Wright

The result is a complete fiasco. Our simple estimate of what the vacuum energy should be comes out to about 10105 joules per cubic centimeter. That's a lot of vacuum energy. What we actually observe is about 10-15 joules per cubic centimeter. So our estimate is larger than the experimental value by a factor of 10120 - a 1 followed by 120 zeroes. Not something we can attribute to experimental error. This has been called the biggest disagreement between theoretical expectation and experimental reality in all of science. — Sean Carroll

The human mind had a remarkable ability both to discount what it sees and make reality conform to expectation. — Cinda Williams Chima

It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination; every species of distress brings with it some peculiar supports, some unforeseen means of resisting, or powers of enduring. — Samuel Johnson

By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water. — Jonathan Lethem

THE HOLE The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality. And only from this standpoint can we understand why the feminine sex is obscene. It is obscene because it is a hole and because it sends out an appeal for a plenitude of flesh. A woman also senses her condition as such an appeal, such an enticement. Thus every hole becomes something obscene because it is an obscene expectation. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope. — Jodi Picoult

To compete in a global economy, our students must continue their education beyond high school. To make this expectation a reality, we must give students the tools they need to succeed, including the opportunity to take a college entrance exam. — Jennifer Granholm

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines. — Nenia Campbell

It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth. — Siri Hustvedt

Grace is the most dangerous, expectation-wre cking, smile-creating, counterintuitiv e reality there is. — Tullian Tchividjian

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. — Wally Lamb

Happiness is there when expectations meet the reality. — Debasish Mridha

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt. — Ben H. Winters

The cicadas were singing a song.
It was a one-noted, one-worded; The words sounded like "please".
They were singing and singing and singing and the whole world was falling down. — Karen Foxlee

Staring down the reality of war, far from home, asleep among strangers, that familiarity, those memories, those ties kept us going; gave us a reason to persevere; toughened us up. — Carlos Wallace

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

When you ask most American parents why they want to have kids, it's to bring more joy into their lives. So, when you don't feel that all-encompassing joy, it must be that something is wrong with you. I think it's dissatisfaction that the expectation was different than the reality. — Jessica Valenti

When your dreams get fulfilled in dreams, wouldn't you rather skip reality? — Nico J. Genes

But when you have been nourishing your soul on expectation, reality is apt to be disappointing. — Eric Ambler

Fantasy Is Not Reality, it is unrealistic to expect your future mate to match your fantasies. — Pamela Cummins

When we are fully conscious and aware, we actually know when we are about to overreact. When we are mindful, we have the mental space and are aware of when our moods change. When we are mindful, we are aware of when our mental models are being challenged and when expectation does not meet with reality, which can trigger an emotional response. — Elizabeth Thornton

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation. — Sharon Salzberg

It's a reality that in this business there's an expectation of being thin. But having a baby is a reality too, and it's more important for me to make milk than to fit into those tiny pants. So that's just going to have to wait. — Emily Procter

If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be short lived, and you may feel that you are never good enough.
The continued hope for the impossible, the expectation that you will or can be unconditionally loved and adored, is not facing reality but rather holding onto an idealized image of yourself and an idealized version of what others can provide. If this is the case, your sense of self may be threatened by shame and its resulting depression, or by feelings of inadequacy for not living up to your unrealistic ideals. A better understanding of shame may help you recognize your tendency to hide what you feel from yourself and others. — Mary C. Lamia

Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way. — Nisargadatta Maharaj

Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he's bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. I was just pretty and gay. You don't ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair; you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon. — W. Somerset Maugham

Christmas is frighteningly magical and mysterious. No wonder people feel lonely in the midst of their families, and unloved in the act of receiving gifts. Christmas is that place where the expectation of happiness confronts the reality of human sadness, where joy to the world means the judgment of mankind. — R. Joseph Hoffmann

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

If perception is stronger then reality why don't we just perceive to have a good day. — Terry Blakeman