This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Unrequited love is the meaning of life. We’re here to love but not to be loved, to give but not receive. Our mission in this world is to improve humanity and leave a better history than we found. Only selfless love has such power. Only love without interest or expectation of reward can change human beings... To give love without receiving love is the truest love and brings the greatest happiness there is in life." - Adolfo Barcella
"I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth." - Richard Baxter
"The highest part of the art of life is the expectation of miracles." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"Uncertainty and expectation are the joyous of life. Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and possessing or a wish discovers the folly of the chase." - William Congreve
"All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than enjoyment; abut all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than expectation." - Owen Feltham
"We part more easily with what we possess, than with our expectations of what we wish for; because expectation always goes beyond enjoyment." - Henry Home, Lord Kames
"At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say that there are times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?" -
"Putting on the spectacles of science in expectation of finding the answer to everything looked at signifies inner blindness." - James Frank Dobie
"We part more easily with what we possess, than with the expectation of what we wish for: and the reason of it is, that what we expect is always greater than what we enjoy." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"“Do you want to be healed?” translates into “Do you want to exorcise your belief in and expectation of illness?" - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
"Faith is expectation. Whatever you strongly and consistently expect to come into your life is invariably what you will experience... Faith is always accompanied by strong emotion. Faith can only extend to the self-imposed boundaries of your present consciousness." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
"Describes the professional artist as a morally suspect, even socially dangerous, conman, who from a deliberately chosen position of spiritual alienation, yet offers the ambiguous, self-serving products of his art, in expectation not only of support and remuneration, but also of social approval and even adoration as genius. [Paraphrased]" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Things temporal are sweeter in the expectation, things eternal are sweeter in the fruition; the first shames thy hope, the second crowns it; it is a vain journey, whose end affords less pleasure than the way." - Francis Quarles
"Never live in hope or expectation, while your arms are folded. God helps those that help themselves. Providence smiles on those who put their shoulders to the wheel that propels to wealth and happiness." - Charles Simmons
"In our pursuit of the things of this world, we usually prevent enjoyment by expectation; we anticipate our 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, or satisfy the desires which were raised about them, and they vanish into nothing." -
"Man counts happiness in a thousand shapes; and the faster he follows it the swifter it flies from him. Almost every thing promiseth happiness to us at a distance, but when we come nearer, either we fall short of it, or it falls short of our expectation; and it is hard to say which of there is the greatest disappointment. Our hopes are usually bigger than the enjoyment can satisfy; and an evil long feared, besides that it may never come, is many times more painful and troublesome than the evil itself when it comes." -
"The clarity of expectation produces Whitmore’s twin performance pillars of greater responsibility and awareness." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"When you abandon the expectation that certainty is possible, you open yourself to the proliferation of possibilities, to the proliferation of alternative visions of the “best” that are available, and you reconcile yourself to the realization that this process is without end. You can never get it exactly right. Every answer, every act is but provisional." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Congreve, William Congreve - Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing and the overtaking and possessing of a wish, discovers the folly of the chase." - Yves Congar, fully Yves Marie-Joseph Congar
"Too much to live with, too little to live for… In our own day this question of life purpose is more urgent than ever. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, our fulfillment is thwarted by this stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have a no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life… Most of us in the midst of material plenty, have spiritual poverty." - Os Guiness
"Fear is the anticipation and expectation of evil or pain, as contrasted with hope which is the anticipation of good. Awe, on the other hand, is the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the presence of mystery. Fear is “a surrender of the succors which reason offers,” awe is the acquisition of insights which the world holds in store for us. Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but, on the contrary, draws us near to it. That is why awe is compatible with both love and joy." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"Generosity’s aim is twofold: we give freely to others, and we give freely to ourselves. Without both aspects, the experience is incomplete. If we give a gift freely, without attachment to a certain result or expectation of what will come back to us, that exchange celebrates freedom both within ourselves as the giver and the receiver… In a moment of pure giving, we really become one." - Sharon Salzberg
"A way of life that bases itself on materialism, i.e., on permanent, limitless expansionism in a finite environment, cannot last long, and that its life expectation is the shorter the more successfully it pursues its expansionist objectives." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"The real winners in life are the people who look at every situation with an expectation that they can make it work or make it better." - Barbara A Pletcher
"That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately... They have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one’s life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward... They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it." - Aristotle NULL
"Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Confrontation with expectation is manipulation. We must share, we must speak our truth, but not simply to get the reaction we want." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life, if it be not too often frustrated; but entertaineth the fancy with expectation of good." - Francis Bacon
"Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life." - George MacDonald
"Trust in memory, in expectation, in mutual communication of many minds might have issued in a system like modern psychologism: the view that all we see, say, and think is false, but that the only truth is that we see, say and think it. If nothing be real except experience, nothing can be true except biography." - George Santayana
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual existence of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If spring came but once in a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"[Paraphrase] The professional artist is morally suspect, even socially dangerous, conman, who from a deliberately chosen position of spiritual alienation, yet offers the ambiguous, self-serving products of his art, in expectation not only of support and remuneration, but also of social approval and even adoration as genius." - Horace Mann
"Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." - Immanuel Kant
"Do not run after happiness, but seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you. The day will dawn full of expectation, the night will fall full of repose. This world will seem a very good place, and the world to come a better place still." - James Freeman Clarke
"Property is nothing but a basis of expectation; the expectation of deriving certain advantages from a thing which we said to possess, in consequence of the relation in which we stand towards it. There is no image, no painting, no visible trait, which can express the relation that constitutes property. It is not material, it is metaphysical; it is a mere conception of the mind." - Jeremy Bentham
"What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea - this delightful morning star, indicting that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the vision of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL