Remember, it’s not conditions but decisions that determine our lives. Disappointment can drive us, or it can defeat us.

They let disappointments destroy them. Disappointment is inevitable when you are attempting to do anything of great scale. Instead, let your disappointments drive you to find new answers; discipline your disappointments

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that make us retreat from further participation.

If we demand a certain answer, we set ourselves up for disappointment, and if disappointment isn’t arrested, it will soon lead to discouragement.

Disappointment is educational

There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment. This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.

When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.

Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.

Disappointment over love affairs generally has the effect of driving men to drink, and women to ruin; and this, because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a constructive nature.

The long series of disappointments you accumulate in a lifetime can stop you from moving forward into all the goodness God has planned for you – and that means they’ll be stopping not only you, but also all those God has destined you to reach along your life journey.

There's a way that the force of disappointment can be alchemized into something that will paradoxically renew you.