Feeling let down is an inevitable part of life, yet it often serves as a powerful catalyst for personal growth and resilience. When disappointment strikes, it can be challenging to find the silver lining, but the right words can offer comfort and clarity. In this carefully curated collection, we present 64 poignant disappointment quotes designed to inspire reflection and encourage a shift in perspective. These quotes, penned by an array of authors and thinkers, provide solace and motivation, reminding us that from the depths of disappointment, we can rise with renewed strength and determination. Whether you're navigating a minor setback or coping with significant hardship, these quotes aim to uplift and guide you towards a brighter horizon.
1. “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” - Jeffrey Eugenides
2. “Altruism is for thosewho can't endure their desires.There's a worldas ambiguous as a moan,a pleasure moanour earnest neighborsmight think a crime.It's where we could live.I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.--Mon Semblable” - Stephen Dunn
3. “Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.” - P.G. Wodehouse
4. “Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.” - Charlotte Brontë
5. “The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.” - Sherwood Anderson
6. “He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.” - P.G. Wodehouse
7. “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” - William Blake
8. “If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.” - Henry David Thoreau
9. “When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.” - Paulo Coelho
10. “If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.” - Anthony Swofford
11. “You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.” - Joel Osteen
12. “Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.” - Paulo Coelho
13. “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” - Margaret Atwood
14. “It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.” - Jodi Picoult
15. “This was our last night. We only had one curtain call, Bree. And I thought they were going to give us a standing ovation, but no-o-o-. Do you know why half the audience stood up?""To get a head start on the traffic," Bree said."To get a head start on the traffic," Antonia agreed in indignation. "I mean, here we are, dancing and singing our little guts out, and all those folks want to do is get to bed early. I ask you, whatever happened to common courtesy? Whatever happened to decent manners? Doesn't anyone care about craft anymore? And on top of that, it's not even nice.” - Mary Stanton
16. “Sadly for my wedding plans, I learned that Nestor is a bardash. I envy the men who enjoy his favors. He has always treated me with friendship which I now value more than my old romantic feelings.” - Tamora Pierce
17. “My feelings for you run very deep." - LoorNot deep enought, I guess." - Bobby (The Rivers of Zadaa)” - D.J. MacHale
18. “I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
19. “The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.” - Stefan Zweig
20. “The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody's imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. Like meeting an online crush after months of e-flirting, the reality didn't live up to the fantasy. It was dull, predictable, and way more attractive in the photos.” - Lisi Harrison
21. “The Ballad of Lucy JordanThe morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy JordanIn a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban townAs she lay there 'neath the covers dreaming of a thousand loversTill the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round.At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd neverRide through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singingLittle nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to school,And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day.She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowersOr run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd neverRide through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hairSo she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singingPretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy JordanOn the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loudAnd she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his hand,And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd.At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found foreverAs she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair” - Marianne Faithfull
22. “Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.” - Eliza Tabor
23. “If you're betrayed, release disappointment at once.By that way, the bitterness has no time to take root.” - Toba Beta
24. “The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.” - Alfred North Whitehead
25. “When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.” - Jodi Picoult
26. “Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.” - Jodi Picoult
27. “Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.” - Sherwood Anderson
28. “It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.” - Deb Caletti
29. “At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.” - Alain De Botton
30. “While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.” - Mark Epstein
31. “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.” - Ann Patchett
32. “Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?” - Kaui Hart Hemmings
33. “You said you were a fairy princessYou said you were a shooting starYou said we'd go to Bora BoraNow look at where the fuck we are” - Jennifer Egan
34. “When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!” - Charlotte Joko Beck
35. “We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.” - Nicole Krauss
36. “Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.” - Tom Wolfe
37. “DisappointmentCan do a couple things.It can drop you into a giantsucking sinkhole ofdepression,a place you have to fightto climb out of. Or itcan trigger an epicmaniato overcome the oddsand transform failureinto success. Say youswingas high as the chains willtake you because you seekthe thrill of flight, and on theup-kick, you lose your seat.Injury is likely. But if youworry about fallingdown,and never chance "up,"the sky will remainforever out of reach.” - Ellen Hopkins
38. “So this was where lust was satisfied. If I'd been an old-time miner I'd have asked for my gold nugget back.” - Ava Gardner
39. “It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.” - Thomas Moore
40. “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” - Upton Sinclair
41. “My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms --- it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted -- confidence destroyed!” - Charlotte Brontë
42. “Truth is, something that I thought was perfect was taken away from me, and I never wanted perfect again. I wanted middle of the road, stuff I didn’t care about so that I couldn’t lose anything I really loved ever again.” - Cecelia Ahern
43. “We may have agreed to end it kitty , but that didnt inlcude being warm and kind to me as a human” - MKF - Screwed Life
44. “...they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve, and if you do, you never get the results you expected.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
45. “He sharpened his flaws and disappointments into daggers.” - Pete Wentz
46. “Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent.” - Tom Perrotta
47. “Hope isn't destiny. Left passive its nothing more than disappointment deferred” - Bill Willingham
48. “I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are.” - Ally Condie
49. “There are people who are never content, never appeased, forever dissatisfied—who continually look to what escapes them, convincing themselves that if only they could attain that one desire outside of reach they would be happy. It seems almost pointless to give to these people because their eyes immediately shift from the gift to stare miserably at the portion held back. Their wants, demands, expectations, appetites are never satiated, thus they refuse to be happy. And you cannot make them so.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
50. “Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.” - Bill Watterson
51. “For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.” - Criss Jami
52. “My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.” - Carol Rifka Brunt
53. “It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.” - Alain De Botton
54. “Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
55. “Fear not the phantom of death, My Countrymen, for his greatnessAnd mercy will refuse to approachYour smallness; and dread not the Dagger, for it will decline to beLodged in your shallow hearts.” - Khalil Gibran
56. “God she hated the dance. A blow to the cheek one minute and discussing a romantic getaway the next. It was the one step forward, two steps back waltz. She wanted to scream. Sitting on the side of the bed, Claire allowed herself tears and swallowed” - Aleatha Romig
57. “...never be disappointing - you may wound me, but you must never be disappointing...” - John Geddes
58. “What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?” - Graham Greene
59. “The road of life is paved with daily successes, a great number of them penny and nickle triumphs. Sadly, these little feats are often seen as worthless―even failures―because we dream of greater gain. Our greed keeps us focused on a gleaming pot of gold waiting at the end of some elusive rainbow. And, despairing a big loss, we fail to see the value in small achievements.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
60. “Today is the day after my wedding. And nothing is the way I expected it to be.” - Rachel Abbott
61. “I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I’d already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I’d tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairy tale in the world.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
62. “I saw Dad's eyes widen just a fraction when he heard my voice catch. He glanced at me but quickly turned away. He didn't want me to see his reaction, but I did, and I'll never forget it. In that brief glimpse, I could see what he was thinking behind that fixed stare. There would be no grandkids, there would be no more Creed family bloodline, nothing else to look forward to. From that point on I'd become the last, most devastating disappointment in what he thought his life had added up to--one overwhelming failure.” - Perry Moore
63. “I say good-bye to hope, but I also say good-bye to hope's disappointment.” - David Levithan
64. “Oh Mom, it turns out my knight in shining armor was just some liar in tinfoil.” - Taryn Plendl
