“Nothing ever goes as you expect. Expect nothing, and you will not be surprised. Expect nothing. Hope for nothing. Nothing.”

— Robert Jordan

Lews Therin Telamon
(15 October 1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Robert Jordan 305

American writer 1948–2007

James Hillman (1926–2011) American psychologist

Source: Suicide and the Soul

“Expect nothing and you'll always be surprised”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

“If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 5

“If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)
Context: We may be asked, I say, why we want it. I will tell you why we want it. We want it because it is our right, first of all. No class of men can, without insulting their own nature, be content with any deprivation of their rights. We want it again, as a means for educating our race. Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation. By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures; you declare before the world that we are unfit to exercise the elective franchise, and by this means lead us to undervalue ourselves, to put a low estimate upon ourselves, and to feel that we have no possibilities like other men. Again, I want the elective franchise, for one, as a colored man, because ours is a peculiar government, based upon a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage.