Joel Embiid Quotes

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Sometimes we fall in love with the idea of a person and have trouble seeing the real thing.

It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.

It fails everybody, pretty much, the American Dream, but people are driven by it. I don't think we're driven by the same sense of hope in Europe. We're driven by pessimism more.

It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.

What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.

Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision

I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.

You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

I think reality is over-rated

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.

People are disappointed that you aren't exactly who they thought you were, as opposed to somebody who's just walking around trying to get some laundry done.

I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.

What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.

Even if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’re going to have to mow that side too.

People expect too much. People who expect heaven always fall into hell - that is the law. Expect heaven and hell is certain. Don't expect heaven and there will never be any hell.

Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.