71 Disappointment Quotes

In the journey of life, disappointment is an emotion that everyone experiences at some point. It can arise from unfulfilled expectations, unforeseen setbacks, or the actions of others. While these moments can be challenging, they also offer opportunities for growth, reflection, and resilience. To help you navigate these times, we've curated a collection of the top 71 disappointment quotes. These words of wisdom from writers, thinkers, and leaders across the ages can provide comfort, insight, and the strength to move forward. Dive in and discover the powerful perspectives that can transform your outlook on life's setbacks.

1. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

2. “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

3. “He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.” - P.G. Wodehouse

4. “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” - William Blake

5. “Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.” - C.S. Goto

6. “Then in a great crash they threw themselves to the floor, ears flopped down, the whites of their eyes showing, looking the way only a dog can look who is totally disappointed. Indeed, they were the very pictures of disappointment.” - Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

7. “I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

8. “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

9. “If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.” - Anthony Swofford

10. “Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.” - L. M. Montgomery

11. “Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ” - Haruki Murakami

12. “There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.” - Sarah Dessen

13. “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

14. “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

15. “A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” - Julian Barnes

16. “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” - Margaret Atwood

17. “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

18. “What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing” - Willem Lange

19. “I embraced a cloud,but when I soaredit rained.” - Frank O'Hara

20. “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

21. “I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

22. “Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” - Oscar Wilde

23. “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

24. “If my attitude be on of fear, not faith, about the one who has disappointed me; if I say “Just what I expected,” if a fall occurs, then I know nothing of Calvary Love.” - Amy Carmichael

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.” - Jennifer Egan

28. “Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.” - Eliza Tabor

29. “If you're betrayed, release disappointment at once.By that way, the bitterness has no time to take root.” - Toba Beta

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “But there were worse things than disappointment, and I'd lived through several of them already.” - R.J. Anderson

34. “When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.” - John Gardner

35. “Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?” - Kaui Hart Hemmings

36. “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

37. “When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.” - P.G. Wodehouse

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.” - J.M. Coetzee

41. “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

42. “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

43. “In this world, who can do a thing, will not;And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power —And thus we half-men struggle.” - Robert Browning

44. “He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.” - Michael Chabon

45. “...recognizing that there is more heartbreak in continuous disappointment than a void...” - Emily Giffin

46. “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

47. “Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.” - Thomas Moore

48. “One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.” - Alain De Botton

49. “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

50. “Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.” - John Ortberg

51. “You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.” - Nicole Krauss

52. “We may have agreed to end it kitty , but that didnt inlcude being warm and kind to me as a human” - MKF - Screwed Life

53. “He sharpened his flaws and disappointments into daggers.” - Pete Wentz

54. “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

55. “Hope isn't destiny. Left passive its nothing more than disappointment deferred” - Bill Willingham

56. “We ruined each other by being together. We destroyed each other’s dreams.” - Kate Chisman

57. “[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.” - James Robertson

58. “Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.” - Bill Watterson

59. “All those men who end up disappointing you. After a while, you don't even want to have feelings anymore. You just want to get on with your life.” - Candace Bushnell

60. “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

61. “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

62. “One minute of sincere gratitude can wash away a lifetime’s disappointments.” - Silvia Hartmann

63. “I do look for the good in everyone. I also give them a chance to be their best, and I try to cope with my disappointment when they're not” - Laura Taylor

64. “What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?” - Graham Greene

65. “Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.” - Oscar Wilde

66. “I hear he liked flowers pretty well.""Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."--"Out, Brief Candle” - Kurt Vonnegut

67. “Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.” - Athol Fugard

68. “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

69. “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

70. “I say good-bye to hope, but I also say good-bye to hope's disappointment.” - David Levithan

71. “Think in terms of opportunities and solutions instead of problems, disappointment, and failure.” - Lorii Myers