Love Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson is catching us in the act of turning our lives into a suspense narrative. The line isn’t about hope in the Hallmark sense; it’s about appetite, almost addiction. We “love to expect” not because outcomes are so sweet, but because anticipation gives the mind something to chew on: a future arranged into a story with us at its center. The punch is his refusal to romanticize fulfillment. Even when expectation is “gratified,” we don’t settle. Satisfaction doesn’t end the cycle; it merely clears the runway for the next projection.

The subtext is slightly scolding, the way Johnson often is: human beings aren’t built to rest in the present. Disappointment and success are both just plot points. We metabolize them into fresh wanting, because wanting supplies motion, identity, and a sense of control over time. Expectation is agency in miniature: a private forecast that makes uncertainty feel manageable. Johnson also slips in an ethical warning. If we prefer expecting to having, we’re easy prey for self-deception, for promises, for schemes that keep us permanently “about to” arrive.

Context matters. Johnson writes out of an 18th-century moralist tradition that treated everyday psychology as a serious subject, and he does it with the crisp balance of a sentence designed to be remembered. The symmetry of “disappointed or gratified” flattens the emotional difference between failure and success; both serve the same master: the craving for forward tilt. It’s a bleakly funny diagnosis of a modern condition before modernity even had a name.