Quotes about Expectation

Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them.

One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.

Confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.

The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb...

The basis of all disappointment is the disproportion between what we imagine or wish for to make us happy and what we actually possess.

Sometimes when you've had a long series of disappointing things happen, you can get into the very bad habit of just expecting more of what you've already had.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.

I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then as I still expect today

Stupidity is expecting figs in winter, or children in old age.