Life has not taught me to expect nothing but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors.
~ Alan Paton
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
~ George Santayana
Don't spend time beating on a wall hoping to transform it into a door.
~ Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
~ Olive Schreiner
It is impossible to control creation.
~ Evelyn Scott
To seek fulfillment is to invite frustration.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.
~ Edgar Watson Howe
There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.
~ Joseph Farrell
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
~ George Eliot
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
~ Henry David Thoreau
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do what experience tells you to do and what your nerves let you do.
~ Bruce Crampton
No Doctor I don't want to grow young again. I just want to keep on growing old.
~ Madame De Rothschild
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
~ Louise Nevelson
There is no such thing as pure pleasure some anxiety always goes with it.
~ Ovid
When somebody tells you nothing is impossible ask him to dribble a football.
~ Anonymous
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
~ Henry Kissinger
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
~ Gabriel García Márquez
So often we search out the impossible and then throw ourselves into trying to do it.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
Prospect is often better than possession.
~ Thomas Fuller
The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.
~ Oliver Goldsmith
'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were.
~ Sir John Sucking
Life is so constructed that the event does not cannot will not match the expectation.
~ Charlotte Brontë
There is no greater enemy to those who would please than expectation.
~ Michel De Montaigne
To dream too much of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.
Too many people miss the silver lining because they're expecting gold.
~ Maurice Setter
For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
~ Elizabeth Bowen
My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.
~ Ellen Sue Stern
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
~ General William Sherman
I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is but it does not admit of holidays.
~ Abraham Lincoln
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but boys it is all hell.
~ General William T. Sherman
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
In combat life is short nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier he is concerned with his literal life chances.
~ Charles E. Moskos
In war more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently from what we had expected and look differently when near from what they did at a distance.
~ Karl Von Clausewitz
In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
~ James Jones
Moderation in war is imbecility.
~ Admiral John Fisher
When one's expectations are reduced to zero one really appreciates everything one does have.
~ Stephen Hawking
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
~ Willa Cather
Life didn't promise to be wonderful.
~ Teddy Pendergrass
We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
~ Pierre Corneille
