Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Just because you make a good plan, doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

Even though I had won in other categories, I didn’t have any expectations when I came into F1. Qualifying fifth, finishing sixth? I didn’t expect it.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I never go into a situation with any type of expectations.

In everything, satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship; nothing that can satisfy but Christ.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

I had not expected ‚A Brief History of Time‘ to be a best seller.

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

Before I was born, my father told my mother, ‚If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.‘

I fully understand the expectations of the state governments. Thus, I am better placed to work closely with the chief ministers.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.