Quotes & Sayings About Pleasant Surprises

If you plan for the worst, all surprises are pleasant. — Robert Jordan

Always plan for the worst, child, that way all your surprises are pleasant ones. — Robert Jordan

Pessimists have only pleasant surprises. — Nero Wolfe

Live your life as if you are ready to say goodbye to it at any moment, as if the time left for you were some pleasant surprise. — Marcus Aurelius

Investment bubbles and high animal spirits do not materialize out of thin air. They need extremely favorable economic fundamentals together with free and easy, cheap credit, and they need it for at least two or three years. Importantly, they also need serial pleasant surprises in such critical variables as global GNP growth. — Jeremy Grantham

Today is a special day for you and for the universe. Today you started your life's journey and the universe got a precious gift and that is you. I am wishing you a day of joy to fill your life with pleasant surprises. — Debasish Mridha

In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from there. The breath, or sound, becomes the central object of focus, as opposed to thought. Thinking becomes one more thing to observe in the field of awareness but is robbed of its preeminent position. Do not grasp after the pleasant or push away the unpleasant, but give equal attention to everything there is to observe, taught the Buddha. This is difficult at first but becomes remarkably easy once one gets the hang of it. One learns first to bring one's attention to the neutral object and then to relax into a state of choiceless awareness rather than always trying to maintain control. As the ego's position is weakened, waking life takes on aspects of dream life to the extent that new surprises keep unexpectedly emerging. — Mark Epstein

When you fill others lives with love and happiness,
your life will be full with pleasant surprises. — Debasish Mridha

What's the matter, don't you like surprises?"
"I like them if they're pleasant ones, and when they happen suddenly," Holly said. "But not when I have to ponder them for an hour and forty-five minutes. — Stuart Woods

I always love to be careful with my expectations so that life has pleasant surprises for me. — Sebastian Thrun

One of the biggest and most pleasant surprises is that, even when you have that need to keep up an appearance of being right or knowing, there is life after admitting you don't know and that's beautiful. — Ben Lee

I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises. — Christopher Hitchens

When we dare to doubt what we are told and take a fresh look at what's going on, we are in for lots of pleasant and fascinating and useful surprises. A new and more satisfying way of life begins to open up, just by noticing what we see. — Douglas Harding

Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs. — Orson Scott Card

So odd. Most women of his acquaintance relied on physical beauty and charm to mask their less-pleasant traits. This girl did the opposite, hiding everything interesting about herself behind a prim, plain facade.
What other surprises was she concealing? — Tessa Dare

Unexpected and pleasant surprises occur every day...random kindnesses from a stranger; would-be tragic accidents narrowly avoided; sicknesses healed.... We will notice if we look. We will see good sprinkled liberally over every day if we are open. — Steve Goodier

Everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises. — Rex Stout

I really didn't have any bad hitchhiking experiences. The only bad experiences were standing by the road for 10 hours. I never thought I'd get a ride with a ministers wife or a coalminer or a Republican elected official. It was all pleasant surprises. The only drag was the waiting. — John Waters

life is nothing but a bundle of events, some you might call as pleasant surprises and others as shocks. But every event contained in the bundle of life has to unfold, it's up to you, whether you enjoy the passing by of shock as it has lightened the weight of your bundle, or you even forgo the joys of pleasant surprises because of it, thus making your bundle heavier. — Ritu Chowdhary

We've a saying that you should always expect pleasant surprises. The unpleasant surprises will come anyway. — Petra Durst-Benning

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant. — Rex Stout

Aunt Rachel removes the knaffea from the oven and places it on its sumptuous tray; the shredded phyllo dough is crisp and brown, crackling with hot, rose-scented syrup. Nestled within, like a naughty secret, is the melting layer of sweet cheese. The pastry is freshly hot, the only way to eat it, really, with its miraculous study in contrasts - the running cheese hidden within crisp, crackling layers of baked phyllo and the distinctive, brocaded complexities of flavors. It's so hot that it steams in your mouth, and at first you eat it with just the tips of your teeth. Then the layers of crisp and sweet and soft intermingle, a series of surprises. It is so rich and dense that you can eat only a little bit, and then it is over and the knaffea is just a pleasant memory - like a lovely dream that you forget a few seconds after you wake. But for a few seconds, you knew you were eating knaffea. — Diana Abu-Jaber

Unrealistic expectations often lead to disappointment, while simple unbiased attention and detachment to outcome often lead to pleasant surprises. — Gary Hopkins

What he'd find there, of course, was up to Pete. But he was sure there were magicians in Tampico and leopard-skins and golden thrones in Juba. Dragons and pirates and white temples where magic dwelt. And best of all, the places he didn't know about yet, the ones that would come as surprises. Oh, not entirely pleasant surprises. There should be a hint of peril, a touch of terror, to emphasize the brightness of adventure ...
("Before I Wake ... ") — Henry Kuttner

It is a fact that every day this time of year,at twenty-three seconds after 4:18, the entire Parthenon of animistic godlings and demons,trolls and sprites of dead chiefs that predated Muhammad, flex their bronzy thews and proceed to gang-piss on Assama. The earliest invaders clocked their movements by it; the lighting,the thunder, and the rain are the sole consistencies of this drowsy, turbulent land,ceaselessly full of surprises, none of them pleasant, all of them keeping you from ever feeling at home. — Millard Kaufman

The plant and animal kingdoms (excluding humans) offered some pleasant surprises. Organisms from these realms are much simpler to figure out. Their behaviours are not muddied by personality factors or flawed belief systems. If an insect smells like a fart, you can be sure that the stench has a genetic basis. It is neither trying to make a lofty point, nor is it suffering from an inferiority complex. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

You can see Musk's embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla's abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn't have "all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars" sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that's what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they're ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises. — Ashlee Vance

More than a pleasant surprise, Danny Schmidt was no less than a revelation to me. And that's not a word I use lightly. — Keith Morris