Anticipation

Anticipation is an emotion involving pleasure, excitement or anxiety in considering some expected, longed-for or dreaded event.

Quotes

 * The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.
 * Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (1996).


 * What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
 * Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Book II, Chap. iv (1837).


 * It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.
 * Herodotus, The Histories, Book 7, Ch. 50.


 * Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
 * Ulysses S. Grant as quoted in "Campaigning with Grant" (December 1896), by General Horace Porter, The Century Magazine.


 * Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
 * John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in Isms (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p. 105.


 * all my life was/anticipation, a waiting on tiptoe.
 * Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin translated from Yiddish by Shirley Kumove (2017)


 * Far off his coming shone.
 * John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book VI, line 768; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 30.


 * We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight.
 * Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Section II The Misery of Man without God, 172 (1669).


 * I would not anticipate the relish of any happiness, nor feel the weight of any misery, before it actually arrives.
 * Spectator, No. 7; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 30.


 * And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day.
 * Henry David Thoreau, Journals, July 11, 1851 (1838-1859).


 * Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.
 * Sun Tzu, The Art of War (6th Century BC).


 * To anticipate & prevent disastrous contingencies would be the part of wisdom & patriotism.
 * George Washington, Letter to John Jay (15 August 1786).