Expectations Fail Quotes & Sayings

If your expectations are always those of someone content to live without physical challenge, then when it comes time for mental, moral, or emotional challenge you fail to meet it because you are out of practice. Meeting and overcoming obstacles are skills that can be honed, as opposed to talents with which we are born. The best way to prepare for the inevitable shit that life occasionally hands us all is to live in a way that prepares you for it. If you can treat personal tragedy like a heavy set of 20 squats, you'll do better than someone who has never met any challenge. Intentionally placing yourself in the position of having to complete a task when you don't know if you can is the single best way of preparing to be in that position unintentionally. — Mark Rippetoe

Man may fail you. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Community does involve psychology stuff - which, in my opinion, is why roughly 90 percent of new communities fail. Forming a community is deeply psychological. Emotional pain and hidden expectations exert a powerful pull on people, and community founders are no exception. Put a group of people in a community visioning session, and you have dozens of different needs and expectations, known and unknown, ricocheting invisibly around the room. — Diana Leafe Christian

If not to God, you will surrender to the opinions or expectations of others, to money, to resentment, to fear, or to your own pride, lusts, or ego. You were designed to worship God and if you fail to worship Him, you will create other things (idols) to give your life to. You are free to choose, what you surrender to but you are not free from the consequence of that choice. — Rick Warren

Upper management placed bets that I would fail within the first few months. The fact is, I had no contacts, no extended family, I didn't know the city, and I didn't even speak the French language. Nevertheless, I was able to break everyone's expectations and become one of the top advisors at the firm year after year. I — Loay Ragheb

eRemember though, that happiness can never be achieved through the expectations levied on another; such a notion is not doomed to fail - but is just doomed! Happiness can never be achieved through the distress or destruction that one imposes on the other person. When a child, now grown-up, does not resolve their deep-seeded anger with a parent or parents, the "other person" plays Hell trying to make-up for it. Married, divorced or dead, the 'other person' can never replace what was lost so much
earlier in the life and soul of the oppressed. Forgiveness must be the course for any future, substantive relationships. — H. Kirk Rainer

Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." — John Daly

beware of expectations. They ruin us. When we expect anything of anyone, we are asking them to fail. — D.L. Bogdan

We will not fail your expectations of us as a new nation dedicated to peace, democracy, and freedom. — Shigeru Yoshida

What messes us up a lot in this life is setting our expectations way too high and then being ashamed when we fail. What is worse is when we allow other people to make us feel ashamed for failing. What is worse than that is hiding and lying about our failure. It's ok to fail, especially when it's a significant life change and you gotta stand up for that right in this life. — Tanya Masse

You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless. You can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone yet secretly tremble with a sense of inadequacy. You can fulfill the expectations of others yet fail your own. You can win every honor yet feel that you have accomplished nothing. What shall it profit a person to gain the esteem of the whole world yet lose his or her own? — Nathaniel Branden

There is no way you would fail to meet my expectations, they have been shattered in the face of the beautiful reality that is you." And there goes my heart, where did it go? Oh yes, in his pocket to carry around for all time. — Alanea Alder

Leaders succeed or fail depending on whether or not they clarify role expectations and keep their promises. — Bob Anderson

Sometimes, marriages fail because people are immature, or because expectations are unrealistic on both sides. Sometimes people die because they have incurable diseases, not because their families turned to the wrong doctor or waited too long to go to the hospital. Sometimes business fail because economic conditions or powerful competition doom them, not because one person in charge made a wrong decision in a crucial moment. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehaviour. We are really not that powerful. Not everything that happens in the world is our doing. — Harold S. Kushner

We have just enough time and money to compare ourselves to others who have more time and money, and we think we should be able to accomplish everything they do and have, without being able to see the sacrifices others have made to have the things they do. We grew up learning we could do anything we put our minds to, but the reality is that you just can't have it all. So when we fail to live up to our own expectations, we think it is because of a problem within us instead of recognizing the very real limitations that come with having finite resources of time, money, and talent. — Jessica N. Turner

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him. — Thomas Hobbes

People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs. — A.C. Grayling

Half of our sorrows come from setting exalted standards for people and then breaking our hearts when they fail to live up to them. — Alice Hegan Rice

A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent. — Abhijit V. Banerjee

Problem with attempting to live up to other people's expectations was that you were destined to fail before you even began. I — Denise Grover Swank

Only thing that makes us fail in all moments, expectations. — Yogeshwaran Selvaraju

It follows that the word probability, in its mathematical acceptance, has reference to the state of our knowledge of the circumstances under which an event may happen or fail. With the degree of information we possess concerning the circumstances of an event, the reason we have to think that it will occur, or, to use a single term, our expectation of it will vary. Probability is the expectation founded upon partial knowledge. — George Boole

But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure - failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes. — John Armstrong

By imputing to human love features properly reserved for divine love, such as the unconditional and the eternal, we falsify the nature of this most conditional and time-bound and earthy emotion, and force it to labour under intolerable expectations. This divinisation of human love is the latest chapter in humanity's impulsive quest to steal the powers of its gods, and the longest-running such attempt to reach beyond our humanity. Like the others it must fail; for the moral of these stories is that the limits of the human can be ignored only at terrible cost. — Simon May

Addiction" might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society. Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in "the distant country," leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled. In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home. The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in "a distant country." It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Love doesn't fail us, it's our expectations that fail us. Lovers sometimes forget that the gift is the call to love itself, and not the result. The quickening, the deepening, the merging, the burning bright in love's cosmic kiln. That's the great gift, no matter where it leads. — Jeff Brown

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for. — Atul Gawande

People we love must be loved as they are. It is a want both of wisdom and courage on our part - a sort of drug - this wilful blindness, to blame them, because they fail our vision of them ... — Mrs. Patrick Campbell

The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a "good" marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off. — M. Scott Peck

It's a mistake to expect benefits from any pose. Expectations make you restless because if you fail to get what you expect, you feel miserable. Yoga practice is an act of adoration to the Lord. You do it because it has to be done. If you have this mental attitude, your selfishness disappears and the benefits come. — Dharma Mittra

You're not who he expected you to be; that doesn't mean you aren't somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely. — Robin Hobb

The God of the legalistic Christian, on the other hand, is often unpredictable, erratic, and capable of all manner of prejudices. When we view God this way, we feel compelled to engage in some sort of magic to appease Him. Sunday worship becomes a superstitious insurance policy against His whims. This God expects people to be perfect and to be in perpetual control of their feelings and thoughts. When broken people with this concept of God fail - as inevitably they must - they usually expect punishment. So they persevere in religious practices as they struggle to maintain a hollow image of a perfect self. The struggle itself is exhausting. The legalists can never live up to the expectations they project on God. — Brennan Manning

If you plan for failure, then you are expecting to fail. If you plan for success, you'll be successful. Once you start making a 'Plan B', you distract from 'Plan A', and the moment you start believing there are other options, you start settling for less. — A.J. Darkholme

Relationships become rocky when men and women fail to acknowledge they are biologically different and when each expects the other to live up to their expectations. Much of the stress we experience in relationships comes from the false belief that men and women are now the same and have the same priorities, drives and desires — Barbara Pease

Bitterness grows in us when we fail to see the trouble and pain in our lives from God's point of view, and when our expectations of what life should be diverge from the reality of what life really is. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Just being here is more than I deserve. There is no way you would fail to meet my expectations, they have been shattered in the face of the beautiful reality that is you. — Alanea Alder

Folks who thrive in God's grace give grace easily, but the self-critical person becomes others-critical. We "love" people the way we "love" ourselves, and if we are not good enough, then no one is. We keep ourselves brutally on the hook, plus our husbands, our kids, our friends, our churches, our leaders, anyone "other." When we impose unrealistic expectations on ourselves, it's natural to force them on everyone else. If we're going to fail, at least we can expect others to fail; and misery loves company, right? — Jen Hatmaker