Realistic Quotes

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian.

When nobody around you seems to measure up it's time to check your yardstick.

Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces marriage is also three meals a day sharing the workload and remembering to carry out the trash.

Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.

In nature there are neither rewards or punishments-there are consequences.

Hope for a miracle. But don't depend on one.

Life guarantees a chance-not a fair shake.

Life is a perilous voyage.

Try as hard as we may for perfection the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare but I can write a book by me.

I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.

At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.

No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.

Learn to ... be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

No one is expected to achieve the impossible.

It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.

May God ... let me strive for attainable things.

I hope to work support my children and die quietly without pain.

Striving for excellence motivates you striving for perfection is demoralizing.

It isn't important to come out on top what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

I cannot do everything but still I can do something and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do something I can do.

[Being a parent] is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love you can get a puppy.

You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.

If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

Life has not taught me to expect nothing but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors.

Don't spend time beating on a wall hoping to transform it into a door.

It is impossible to control creation.

Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.

There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do what experience tells you to do and what your nerves let you do.

When somebody tells you nothing is impossible ask him to dribble a football.

The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.

So often we search out the impossible and then throw ourselves into trying to do it.

Prospect is often better than possession.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.

'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were.

Life is so constructed that the event does not cannot will not match the expectation.

To dream too much of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but boys it is all hell.

In combat life is short nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier he is concerned with his literal life chances.

In war more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently from what we had expected and look differently when near from what they did at a distance.

In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.

Do not commit the error common among the young of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.

If one considered life as a simple loan one would perhaps be less exacting.

Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?

There's no map there's no master plan there's just people.