Quotes About Expectations

We are unhappy because we think that love is something we require from someone else.

The humorist has solved his problem by joining two incompatible matrices together in a paradoxical synthesis. His audience, on the other hand, has its expectations shattered and its reason affronted by the impact of the second matrix on the first; instead of fusion there is collision; and in the mental disarray which ensues, emotion, deserted by reason, is flushed out in laughter.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I'm constantly lowering my ideals...

If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.

once upon a time I used to think that when I got money again I would have a maid and my wife would take it easy. Now I got money, and I got a maid, and my wife is workin' for the maid.

The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.

It would be a great advantage to a young man if his early training could eradicate the idea that the world has a great deal to offer him. But the usual result of education is to strenghten this delusion; and our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than from fact.

The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed. In other words, his center of gravity is not in himself; it is constantly changing its place, with every wish and whim.

In order not to judge unfairly one ought also to settle definitely one's expectations from this [our] point of view, and to regard, for example, even learned men, since as a rule they have become so only by the force of outward circumstances, primarily as men whom nature really intended to be tillers of the soil; indeed even professors of philosophy ought to be estimated according to this standard, and then their achievements will be found to come up to all fair expectations.

The anxieties of all of us, our worries, vexations, bothers, troubles, uneasy apprehensions and strenuous efforts are due, in perhaps the large majority of instances, to what other people will say;

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realised that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat.

Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon.

Her tolerance of "Men's Needs," as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter.

men are who they are. We try to make them into something they are not, and then are astonished when they turn out not to be what we wanted. We betray ourselves.

Louisa had been right about one thing. Many gentlemen took mistresses after they were married. It seemed almost expected. Society marriages often occurred because two families wanted to increase their power or wealth. A poor aristocrat married a rich nabob's daughter; the daughter of an impoverished baron married a wealthy merchant. Even better, wealthy nobility married each other.

Indeed, in the medical model, the person with disability is placed under an obligation to want to get well, his or her multiple social roles of parent, worker, spouse, and so on being suspended temporarily in exchange for a sign of strenuous effort toward improvement.

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.

The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?

A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.

What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.

Equally troubling, people seem happy to let us off the hook.