Other related topics at: All In Your Mind The Whole Truth 12. Disappointment; Experience; Learning; Reality "I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed." Johnson: Letter to Bennet Langton Link 20. Disappointment; Reality "The excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation raised as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectations raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken." Johnson: Letter to Baretti (June 10, 1761) Link 1,692. Reality "That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must sometime be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eyes wander over life, whose fancy dances over meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state." Johnson: Idler #41 (January 27, 1759) Link 1,723. Reality "It would be undoubtedly best, if we could see and hear everything as it is, that nothing may be too anxiously dreaded, or too ardently pursued." Johnson: Idler #50 (March 31, 1759) Link