Quotes About Expectations

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: It's there.

I remember asking her to tell me the secret of her charm and her growing success. As usual, she laughed. Nobody knows me. I never say what I think or what I'm planning to do. But I let everyone know that I have high expectations. I don't have to settle for less than the best. That way my value goes up, into the clouds!

you believe that the only way to be successful in a pressure situation is to perform better than you ever have performed before—that is, to be perfect—you stop trusting your capabilities, and worse, you start doing things that do not help you succeed. You

I admit that I have been surprised during recent times. People I thought might well flee into the shadows have proved to be strong enough to remain in constant touch, while others of whom I expected more have disappeared over the horizon. But I don't pass judgment on anybody. People are who they are. One doesn't need to have many friends -- but one should be able to rely on those one has.

The main question is "Do you own your pain?" As long as you do not own your pain—that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world—the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give. As a result, you will feel frustrated, and those you wanted to help will feel confused, disappointed, or even further burdened.

Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts.

Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means.

Doctors, lawyers, and psychologists study to become qualified professionals who are paid to know what to do. A well-trained theologian or minister is only able to point out the universal tendency to narrow God down to our own little conceptions and expectations, and to call for an open mind and heart for God to be revealed.

When I demand from others what only God can give, I experience pain.

When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us.

And because of our culture's emphasis on psychology and interpersonal relationships, we import a consumer mentality to our intimacies. We expect more of our friends and partners than they can (or want to) give.

Sometimes we feel trapped in our humanness. We experience keenly how things fall short of our expectations.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind.

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticize would be a peculiarly discreditable act.

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. 

If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.

It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience.

Was he in love with Gilbert Osmond's wife, and if so what comfort did he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature's own was this the service her husband had asked of her?

She's too personal—considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door." "Yes," Isabel admitted, "she doesn't sufficiently recognize the existence of knockers; and indeed I'm not sure that she doesn't think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one's door should stand ajar.

You're a very nice girl, but I wish you'd flirt with me, and me only.

Of course you mean that I'm meddling in what doesn't concern me. But why shouldn't I speak to you of this matter without annoying you or embarrassing myself? What's the use of being your cousin if I can't have a few privileges? What's the use of adoring you without hope of a reward if I can't have a few compensations? What's the use of being ill and disabled and restricted to mere spectatorship at the game of life if I really can't see the show when I've paid so much for my ticket?

She longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.

Ah, things are always different from what they might be," said the old man. "If you wait for them to change you'll never do anything.