Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy. [ Lao-Tze ]

We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloyed? [ Colton ]

I would not anticipate the relish of any happiness, nor feel the weight of any misery, before it actually arrives. [ Spectator ]

We anticipate our own happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness of worldly pleasures by delightful forethought of them. [ Tillotson ]

There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives? [ Seneca ]

The reading of romances will always be the favorite amusement of women: old, they peruse them to recall what they have experienced; young to anticipate what they wish to experience. [ A. Ricard ]

At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day. [ Hawthorne ]

What is it that keeps men in continual discontent and agitation? It is that they cannot make realities correspond with their conceptions, that enjoyment steals away from among their hands, that the wished-for comes too late, and nothing reached and acquired produces on the heart the effect which their longing for it at a distance led them to anticipate. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]