Quotes About Expectations

She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.

What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?

But there was another thing Momo couldn't quite understand - a thing that hadn't happened until very recently. More and more often these days, children turned up with all kinds of toys you couldn't really play with: remote-controlled tanks that trundled to and fro but did little else, or space rockets that whizzed around on strings but go nowhere, or model robots that waddled along with eyes flashing and heads swiveling but that was all.

Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not.

When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, the way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren't sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: Be home by ten, okay?

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

Things went so well for him so often that no one ever needed to worry about how he behaved when they didn't go well.

A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses.

I think it's going to set the world on fire," said Gates. "It didn't do anything. There are fifteen comments at the bottom of the piece on the Web, and all of them are Russian mail order brides.

The experimental psychologist "rarely attributes a deviation of results from expectations to sampling variability because he finds a causal 'explanation' for any discrepancy

Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door.

Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children's gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too.

Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.

You must remember," she said, putting a bony hand on mine, "that true stories do not always end as we would wish them to. Would you like to hear the truth of what happened, or shall I make something up for you just to keep you happy?

Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.

Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed.

The Cleese Theory of Convenience. I think, roughly précised, it means that everyone will do only what's most convenient for them – and if you want things done your way you must not appear too agreeable or easy to please, or you will be the victim of other people's desire for convenience.

The human capacity for discontent should not be underestimated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have.

Kids' perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don't simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it.

Being 15, I feel like people want me to go down the Justin Bieber, Cody Simpson sort of genre.

I think, for me, with regard to my parents, my biggest fear was not that they would reject me but that I would disappoint them. That by coming out, I would simultaneously dash my own dreams and their dreams for me, and I was afraid of letting them down.