Quotes About Expectations

Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.

We tend to live up to our expectations.

There is no greater burden than great potential.

Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is not to be attached to the results of your actions.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.

Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school.

We usually overestimate what we think we can accomplish in one year-but we grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

Our relationship was forged slowly over time, and strengthened by the combination of the intense fire of his high expectations and my determination to learn. It matured when it became a "learning relationship" and my respect for him caught up with his respect for me.

Coach Wooden's approach succeeded: Setting challenging expectations appropriate to each individual; getting to know each individual well and caring for each as a person; tailoring his instructions and support to individual differences; and treating everyone with respect and fairness. It succeeded for him in the classroom, on the court, and in life.

Mike Look, we're gonna spend half the night driving around the Hills looking for this one party and you're going to say it sucks and we're all gonna leave and then we're gonna go look for this other party. But all the parties and all the bars, they all suck. I spend half the night talking to some girl who's looking around the room to see if there's somebody else who's more important she should be talking to. And it's like I'm supposed to be all happy 'cause she's wearing a backpack, you know

In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.

Being able to do exactly as one pleases is the surest way to remain perpetually unpleased.

I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.

Parents should learn to stop nagging their children about how well they could do "if you only tried more, or cared more." Trying and caring, in specific areas, is built into people; or else it comes to them later, if they mature properly; or it never comes at all. But it is dead certain that no young person was ever motivated by a querulous, disappointed parent more concerned with his own pride than with the child's ultimate self-actualization.

Somebody once said that if many people had not read about romantic love and seen it on the screen, they would never look for it themselves. I believe this. And along with it I believe that if many people were not ashamed to be thought deficient in "family feeling" they would never have children.

All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he is in a hopeless bind. His goals have been set for him by his milieu, and he cannot be his own man; so he simply refuses to play the game. He "does not try.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair.

I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don't know if I'm the monarch of all I survey.

I'd say, "But I'm not happy." And she'd say, "Where is it written that you're supposed to be happy all the time?