Henry Home Quotes

Any object of desire is bound to bring frustration. Any expectation is bound to turn into frustration. Expectation is the beginning of frustration, the very seed. Beware of it!

Expectation ... quickens desire, while possession deadens it.

expectation isn't the same as desire

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

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

There are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession.

It is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish.

Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

The mind lives through more, and the more cannot be fulfilled; that is impossible. IT ENDS IN TEARS. Every desire ends in frustration, because every expectation is the beginning of frustration. Why does every desire end in frustration? There are only two alternatives: either you achieve your object of desire or you don't achieve it, but in both cases it will end in tears. If you achieve it you will see the utter futility of it all.

Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.

Hope is merely another face of desire.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

That in all these worldly Things, that a Man pursues with the greatest Eagerness and Intention of Mind imaginable, he finds not half the Pleasure in the actual Possession of them, that he proposed to himself in the Expectation.

When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

We get caught. How? Not by what we give but by what we expect. We get misery in return for our love: not from the fact that we love but from the fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery.

I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed.

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

It doesn't matter what you're chasing, when you get there you're gonna be like, "Oh, is this all? It kind of sucks."

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind.

In our pursuit of the things of this world, we usually prevent enjoyment, by expectation; we anticipate our own happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness of worldly pleasures, by delightful forethoughts of them; so that when we come to possess them, they do not answer the expectation, nor satisfy the desires which were raised about them, and they vanish into nothing.