Quotes About Expectations

If a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won't accept it. It is "too simple," "too dull." We are trained to respect only what is inflated, hyperintense, high-pressured, big and complicated.

must do this. If she behaves strangely, or if something goes dreadfully wrong, or there are many tears, he usually doesn't understand that marriage is a totally different experience for her than for him.

Let us remember that Transactional Psychology has proven that, contrary to common sense and the prejudices of centuries, our minds do not passively receive impressions from the external world. Rather we actively create our impressions: out of an ocean of possible signals, our brains notice the signals that fit what we expect to see, and we organize these signals into a model, or reality-tunnel, that marvelously matches our ideas about what is really out there.

I congratulated him on his perceptivity. Indeed, that is one of my major messages, in everything I write — our emic realities are programmed by our expectations. You are the Master who makes the grass green.

Businessmen learn the way businessmen are supposed to be. Professors learn the way professors are supposed to be. Construction workers learn how construction workers are supposed to be. They spend their lives trying to be what they're supposed to be and being scared they aren't. Quiet desperation.

But a lot of people got married so they could fuck six times a week. Then in a while they only felt like fucking once a week and had to talk to each other in between. Created a lot of drunks.

Wouldn't you think," Marcy said, "with all that money and all that time on their hands, nobody works, that these women could manage to look better than they do?" "Well it's not like they all married Tom Selleck," Jesse said.

Women hate a debt as men a gift.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, no matter what the posters say.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.

Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that's what Americans expect. Ain't life a bitch?

Am I the kind of person I want my eternal companion to be?

After all, good intentions have little to do with positive outcomes

I don't try to be perfect. It's the perfect ones that attract suspicion.

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.

The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?

The grass is not always greener on the other side

Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed. Your

Men do not understand how women think, and vice versa; each tries to make the other act more like a member of their own sex.

While a friend expects more and more favors, and seethes with jealousy, these former enemies expected nothing and got everything. A man suddenly spared the guillotine is a grateful man indeed, and will go to the ends of the earth for the man who has pardoned him.

According to Machiavelli, human beings naturally tend to think in terms of patterns. They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable.

This mental habit offers excellent ground for deception, using a strategy that Machiavelli calls "acclimatization"—deliberately creating some pattern to make your enemies believe that your next action will follow true to form. Having lulled them into complacency, you now have room to work against their expectations, break the pattern, and take them by surprise.