Quotes About Expectations

It's hard to predict, isn't? The things that will make us happy

Happiness occurs when you for get who you're expected to be. And what you're expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self acceptance. It's the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.

Maybe it wasn't the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother's parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.

The more 'success' you get, the easier it is to be disappointed by not getting things. The only difference is that now no one feels sorry for you.

so we need quite quickly to learn how to be happy with not having society's unrealistic version of the 'best' body, and a bit happier with having our body

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction.

She wouldn't poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection.

But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become.

A world where, in the words of American sociologist Sherry Turkle, "we expect more from technology and less from each other.

We blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst." In this view, happiness is impossible, because of all these goals. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

She went on Instagram and saw everyone had worked out how to live, except her.

HAPPINESS IS NOT good for the economy. We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves. Our bodies are too fat, or too thin, or too saggy. Our skin is expected to have the right 'sun-kissed glow', or the

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time.

Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that — and we shall — there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn't flat. It is not for science — and certainly not for medicine — to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.

But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

Be depressed on Mondays and happy on Saturdays. Not the other way round. It will annoy people.

She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing people into their delusional idea of happiness?

Much of what is sold to us is the idea that we could be better than who we are if we tried to become something else.

We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren't photoshopped and filtered.

We are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.

If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can't be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it.

It's hard to predict, isn't it? The things that will make us happy.