Quotes About Expectations

Rated G is nobody gets the girl. PG is the good guy gets the girl. R is the bad guy gets the girl. XXX is everybody gets the girl.

UNIVERSITY... In the great American universities men are ranked as follows: 1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Boozefighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers; 5. Poker players; 6. Scholars...

Cory said abruptly: 'Enough of these trials and tests; clearly you all are competent at slitting throats and drowning old women. Whether you can achieve more strenuous acts remains to be seen. Now then: seat yourselves, and give me all your attention, and I will tell you what I expect of you. Landlord, bring us ale, then step from the room, as we wish to make private conversation.

Working to fulfill someone else's needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

It is a dangerous thing to bring a dream to life....I have watched my deepest, dearest hopes take shape, and I am not entirely sure I like the shape they have taken.

It wasn't necessary for me to stop Anthea's heart. Each death had contributed a little to killing her. There had been so much hope when we'd escaped from the prison, and then the slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.

A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I've known were the laziest. Never work because it's expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don't do any more.

perfectionism is sometimes the most dangerous set of thoughts you can let make their home in your head.

Anger is a form of dishonesty. Nobody is perfect. It's a lie to expect the people around you to be perfect.

People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy. It doesn't work that way.

In some cultures, like Buddhism, you want things in your life to disappear, to reduce your needs and desires. To achieve some form of enlightenment. I believe in this brand of spirituality as well. I don't think it and abundance are mutually exclusive at all. If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.

I don't like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy.

If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.

Defining freedom in different ways (reducing expectations, increasing sources of income so no one source controls you).

College. Owning a home. Marriage. Children. Having a cushy job. Postponing our dreams for when there will be money. "Work hard and succeed!" Ten thousand hours to mastery. And so on.

Always over-promise and over-deliver. Sometimes people hate that. They want to under promise and over deliver. Don't do that

Every time I refused to believe in and act on the American Dream, I was punished severely. Because everyone else has invested so much of their money and lives in this dream that it freaks them out when other people deviate—let alone take a detour, or be happier.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

The life you think you should want,' said Eric, 'is always the life that looks safest.

You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus expected to be set forever.... You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.