88 Expectation Quotes

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.

Look how often the unexpected happens -- yet we still never expect it.

Everything takes longer than you expect - even when you expect it to take longer than you expect.

If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life- that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment- that would be the perfect state.

One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.

You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there's one more step? I'm like that all the time.

There is nothing beyond God, and the sense enjoyments are simply something through which we are passing now in the hope of getting better things.

It was a saying of Demetrius Phalereus, that 'Men having often abandoned what was visible for the sake of what was uncertain, have not got what they expected, and have lost what they had,-being unfortunate by an enigmatical sort of calamity.'

It was a lie of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said that when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only

There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation.

The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book - or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

My lucky number is four billion. That doesn't come in real handy when you're gambling. 'Come on four billion! Fuck! Seven. Not even close. I need some more dice. Four billion divided by six, at least.'

A girl called me the other day and said 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.

Some fellows pay a compliment like they expected a receipt.

Yes, the springtime was in need of you. Often a star waited for you to espy it and sense its light. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked below an open window, a violin gave itself to your hearing. All this was trust. But could you manage it? Were you not always distraught by expectation, as if all this were announcing the arrival of a beloved?

And they'll talk to you while you're in trances And you'll visualize not taking any chances But meet them halfway with love, peace and persuasion And expect them to rise for the occasion.

Fond archer, Hope! who tak'st thy aim so far, That still or short, or wide thine arrows are!

If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.

I went to China, I didn't want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.

Unos principios de credito sirven de despertar la curiosidad, no de empenar el objecto. Mejor sale quando la realidad excede al concepto y es mas de lo que se creyo. Faltara esta regla en lo malo, pues le ayuda la mesma exageracion; desmientela con aplauso, y aun llega a parecer tolerable lo que se temio extremo de ruin.

The idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can't imagine.

The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This can't be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is. (Ch. 10)

'I thought we would be huge - and we were.'

At last she was going to know the joys of love, the fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ecstasy, rapture: she was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion; everyday life had receded, and lay far below, in the shadows between those peaks.

'You should have been like NOOOOO!!!'

Say my name before you disappear. I always thought that you could handle this. ~ 'Come Back Home'

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

On ev'ry hand it will allowed be, He's just-nae better than he should be.

I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate.

To swallow gudgeons ere they're catched, And count their chickens ere they're hatched.

In her own quiet way, Suhana brought smiles and joy into our house even before she was born.

I suppose a Knighthood is out of the question then?

The worst comes to the worst.

Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other performer in the history of rock 'n' roll, a singer who can not be pinned down, dismissed or fitted into anyone's expectations. He is a conundrum.

I warrant you, if he danced till doomsday, he thought I was to pay the piper.

The theatre was full - crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising. She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos - hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing - half lava, half glow. I had heard this woman termed 'plain,' and I expected bony harshness and grimness - something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame. For awhile - a long while - I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength - for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood. It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral. Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public - a milder condiment for a people's palate - than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised. Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster - like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.

I think it is fairly clear why none of us do experience something beyond the mere watching. There may be rare moments of an emotional state in which we see, as it were, the clarity of the sky between clouds, but I do not mean anything of that kind. All such experiences are temporary and have very little significance. The questioner wants to know why, after these many years of watching, he hasn't found the deep waters. Why should he find them? Do you understand? You think that by watching your own thoughts you are going to get a reward: if you do this, you will get that. You are really not watching at all, because your mind is concerned with gaining a reward. You think that by watching, by being aware, you will be more loving, you will suffer less, be less irritable, get something beyond; so your watching is a process of buying. With this coin you are buying that, which means that your watching is a process of choice; therefore it isn't watching, it isn't attention. To watch is to observe without choice, to see yourself as you are without any movement of desire to change, which is an extremely arduous thing to do; but that doesn't mean that you are going to remain in your present state. You do not know what will happen if you see yourself as you are without wishing to bring about a change in that which you see. Do you understand?

I am standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go onstage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding, and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learnt are not in this play at all, but belong to quite a different one. Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what should I do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way onto the stage, and then look for guidance to the prompter, whose head i can just see rising out of the floor-boards. Alas he only signals helplessly to me and I realise of course that his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience, who begins to his and shout: 'Get off the stage!', 'Let the play go on!', 'You're interrupting!'. I am paralysed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don't fit. The only lines I know.

She was sure [he] would follow her. [he] would bend to her as he had always bent, resilient and accommodating

If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less.

It's going to be brutal!

' one TWOO AAAAAND no.'

I suppose, to use our national motto, something will turn up.

He was fresh and full of faith that 'something would turn up.'

'Anne, my sister Anne, do you see nothing coming?' 'I see nothing but the sun that makes everything dusty, and the grass that grows green.'

When there are such lands there should be profitable things without number.

'T was the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring,-not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.

When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

'Now I'm going to marry my first wife, then I'm going to divorce her. Now, I know what you're going to say, but stick with me, my story gets better! I'm going to marry my second wife, then I'm going to kill her! Cut her head off! Ah, you weren't expecting that, were you? Third wife, going to shoot her! Fourth wife, put her in a bag! Fifth wife, into outer space! Sixth wife on a Rotissomat! Seventh wife will be made out of jam :'

What did you expect? To let the Germans take out the three leaders with one stroke?

'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out. Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all economy to justify the expense of the first - and for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment - 'tis a point of HONOUR. I need not be told, that the ethic writers have assigned this all to Patience; but that VIRTUE, methinks, has extent of domination sufficient of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled castles which HONOUR has left him upon the earth.

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.

I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they're fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

Who is this that comes in grandeur, coming from the blazing East? This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere.

I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn some day, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance - and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long