William Godwin Quotes

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

Hope is a dream deferred.

Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you.

Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

Things always look better when you haven't seen them.

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.

Waiting and hoping are the whole of life, and as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that today is like yesterday, but he believes tomorrow will be different.

We promise in proportion to our hopes, and we deliver in proportion to our fears.

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.

Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

Sure, there was no guarantee any of these things would actually happen as he envisioned. But maybe that wasn‟t the point.It was the planning that counted, whether it ever came to fruition or not.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

I'm not really sure what it was, the best moment. You always hope it's to come.

I don't have any expectations of anything.

I believe that I am only at a beginning, only knocking at a door, and I believe that the best is yet to come.

Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.