Quotes About Expectations

The Great Bookkeeper up in the sky has always been reluctant to give me money. Or perhaps I never learned to think big. I decided that if your demands are less than your income, you are rich, but if your demands are greater, you feel poor. The trick is to adjust your demands.

Die Mannsleute sind doch immer noch schlimmer als man denkt.

Der Eindruck, den Effi empfing, war überall derselbe: mittelmäßige Menschen, von meist zweifelhafter Liebenswürdigkeit, die, während sie vorgaben, über Bismarck und die Kronprinzessin zu sprechen, eigentlich nur Effis Toilette musterten, die von einigen als zu prätentios für eine so jugendliche Dame, von andern als zu wenig dezent für eine Dame von gesellschaftlicher Stellung befunden wurde.

Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish.

In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough, and women are afraid they might be considered only women.

The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

All these nervous people, from the unemployed to the public figure liable at any moment to incur the wrath of those whose investment he represents, believe that only by empathy, assiduity, serviceability, arts and dodges, by tradesmen's qualities, can they ingratiate themselves with the executive they imagine omnipresent, and soon there is no relationship that is not seen as a 'connection', no impulse not first censored as to whether it deviates from the acceptable.

If people demand sexual liberty for themselves, but sexual fidelity from others, the result is the inflammation of jealousy, for it is natural to suppose that one is being done by as one is doing to others – and jealousy is the most frequent precipitant of violence between the sexes.

comes as a genuine shock to parents of children to whom nothing has been denied that they should turn out selfish, demanding and intolerant of the slightest frustration.

large and honest, but indifferent or incompetent, state bureaucracy creates expectations that give rise to this dialectic of dependence and resentment, which does not exist in Italy, where no one would assume the honesty and therefore the benevolence of the public administration in the first place.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

Good intentions are certainly no guarantee of good results.

few are so conformist as rebellious youth.

Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.

the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.

For voters what matters is what government actually delivers for them.

Don't piss on my Utopia.

I'm afraid of the emptiness in my life. I'm afraid I've built you into something you're not.

In football you always get judged on your last game. Whoever you are, or how amazing you are, it's the last game that everyone has seen.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Pastors simply need three characteristics to satisfy all their church members: omniscience; omnipresence, and omnipotence.

Churches with high expectations not only reach the unchurched but retain them as well.

People have no desire to be a part of something that makes no difference, that expects little. And, frankly, many churches have dumbed down church membership to the point that it has no meaning at all.

Many guests really want to know, "What's next?" Is your church ready to answer them?