Quotes About Expectations

The secret to happiness is to lower your expectations. ...that is what you compare your experience with. If your expectations and standards are very high and only allow yourself to be happy when things are exquisite, you'll never be happy and grateful. There will always be some flaw. But compare your experience with lower expectations, especially something not as good, and you'll find much in your experience of the world to love, cherish and enjoy, every single moment.

I'm aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you're savvy about pop culture, it's so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.

In a consumer society, expectations dare not plateau, because a growing economy depends on rising expectations... The more we let our level of contentment be determined by outside factors-a new car, fashionable clothes, a prestigious career, social status-the more we relinquish control over our own happiness.

When life's conditions don't equal your expectations you are unhappy, have no expectations only appreciations (especially in the area of relationships)

Expectations always lead to frustrations. Expectations are the seeds, and frustration is the crop that sooner or later you will have to reap. It is your own doing.

You will learn that at higher levels of energy, our fields of prayer act very quickly to bring us exactly what we expect. If we fear, it brings to us what we fear. If we hate, it brings us more of what we hate. Thankfully when we go into these negative expectations, our prayer-fields collapse rather quickly because we lose our connection with the divine and are no longer outflowing love. But a fear expectation can still be powerful. That is why you must monitor your expectations carefully and set your field consciously.

Although we deal with probabilities and expectations, the actual results can deviate substantially from such expectations, particularly on a short-term basis.

When you're making any movie, you have your hopes and expectations - but reality doesn't always conform with your hopes and expectations.

Expectations of goals and rewards (such as Enlightenment) are recognized for what they are: last-ditch attempts by the ghostly self to subvert the process to its own ends. The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego.

So top grade's O for 'Outstanding,'" Hermione was saying, "and then there's A-" "No, E," George corrected her, "E for 'Exceeds Expectations.' And I've always thought Fred and I should've got E in everything, because we exceeded expectations just by turning up for the exams.

Living up to other people's expectations is always difficult. And then you have your own expectations and you set yourself goals that are very, very high. And that's true for everyone.

If your expectations aren't to be the best, then... you know, nobody rises to low expectations.

We don't want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

Audiences crave something they've never seen before. That's what they want. They want to be dazzled. They want to go in either to have their expectations blown out of the water, or have no expectations and are dazzled by the decisions that we filmmakers made.

In life and in movies, it's a similar challenge, where you have expectations, and you end up in situations that are not meeting your expectations.

If we treat people as who they can become, they will be inspired to rise to the level of our expectations.

Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way, others' expectations can be avoided.

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

Winning a Grand Slam changes everything. There is so much off-court stuff to deal with. And there are expectations of keeping it going that make it tough

Every time I felt the pain coming on I'd go downstairs and hammer out an idea. After a few months I started to take a look at what I was making, I had for the first time in my life written a large grip of songs completely alone and without any expectations or plans of what they would be for.

There were two different expectations in this land of the future. On the one hand the the optimistic belief in an unending progress with millenarianistic overtones and on the other hand the doomsday expectation of the final battle of Armageddon. Both are perspectives are uniquely American and both are inter-related.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you're supposed to be to live a more authentic life.

Whenever you looked forward to anything pleasant you were sure to be more or less disappointed . . . perhaps that is true. But there is a good side to it too. The bad things don't always come up to your expectations either . . . they nearly always turn out ever so much better than you think.

The campaigns of Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and John McCain all outperformed expectations on their support from independent voters. They made no effort to shy away from ideology, but conveyed to voters that their policies were driven by principle, not party talking points.

Most of my life is over. I am going to enjoy my family and friends before any of us depart this earth. I'll never start another company. I'll never work long hours again. At this point in my life, I only answer to God, my wife, and my kids. Everything else is secondary - especially the expectations of strangers.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

We’ve been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional and it honestly doesn’t. … I want to live in a world where we don’t have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning.

Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well.

I think it's always nice to have a film where the underdog comes out on top, doing their best, and surpasses everybody's expectations.

Rather than seeing the opportunities that feminism created they very easy morph into expectations.

In the 20th century there's was the long-running division in the Republican Party between what was known as Wall Street and Main Street Republicans. And sort of different expectations about the use of the federal government.

You don't have to let yourself be terrorized by other people's expectations of you.

The way we make money as a group is that we don't pay a lot for anything, and most of the stocks we buy have low expectations.

Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn't happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, 'I can't believe this happened to me.' And who did you think it was going to happen to - the woman across the street?

Now if you can recognize and memorize a grandmaster's game, and you have the respect to understand [Zimbabwean president Robert] Mugabe who has survived past anyone's expectations, and make the simple assumption it wasn't an accident, and you understand why he did what he did, now you're ready to predict ... The key to forecasting is to understand both the constraints nations are under and the manner in which the struggle for power shapes leaders.

In my 20 years in football, I was fortunate enough never to have experienced relegation. And while there is the pressure of expectations at the top of the league, at the bottom it comes in fear and trepidation, which is almost worse.

I try not to think of myself as a woman filmmaker. I don't look for women influences. I have noticed in the past few years that there is a certain ceiling that a woman filmmaker can reach. I don't believe that it's sexism per se, but there are certain expectations in the industry about what films should be, how they should be made, what stories they should tell, and it's a habit, it's a tradition.

The more you expect from life, the more your expectations will be fulfilled. By laughing, you do not use up your laughter, but increase your store of it. The more you love, the more you will be loved. The more you give, the more you will receive. Life proves that truth every hour, every day. And life continues to surprise.

The soft bigotry of low expectations

If the fidelity [ in a book] isn't maintained, the reader will think your structure is extraneous, or superficial, or that you're trying to curry favor, or live up to the expectations of some sort of genre or structure.

I think the media makes it tough to play in New York. There are so many papers and TV channels covering the Knicks and the expectations for the Knicks are so high.

Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.

My dad has always been very proud of me but I think I have exceeded his expectations. When I told him I wanted to be an actor and moved to New York City, I think he assumed I would be playing the guitar on the subway and collecting spare change in my guitar case. The fact that I'm not doing that means that I'm a huge success.

Weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations - many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.

Holidays in general breed unrealistic expectations. The minute you start wondering, 'is it going to be wonderful enough?,' it never will be.

I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.

My expectations of other people, I double them on myself.