Disappointment

Disappointment is the feeling of dissatisfaction that follows the failure of expectations to manifest. Similar to regret, it differs in that the individual feeling regret focuses primarily on the personal choices that contributed to a poor outcome, while the individual feeling disappointment focuses on the outcome itself.

Sourced

• The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men,
  Gang aft a-gley,
  And leave us nought but grief and pain,
  For promised joy.
  • Robert Burns, To a Mouse (1785), Stanza 7. See also Anna Letitia Barbauld, Rose's Petition; John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther; Alexander Pope, Imitation of Horace, Book II, Satire 6.

• Like to the apples on the Dead Sea's shore,
  All ashes to the taste.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), 34.

• As distant prospects please us, but when near
  We find but desert rocks and fleeting air.
  • Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1699), Canto III, line 27.

• But O! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
  I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
  • John Milton, On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658).

• All is but toys; renown and grace is dead;
  The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
  Is left this vault to brag of.
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act II, scene 3, line 99.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 195.

• But evil fortune has decreed,
  (The foe of mice as well as men)
  The royal mouse at last should bleed,
  Should fall—ne'er to arise again.
  • Michael Bruce, Musiad.

• Lightly I sped when hope was high
  And youth beguiled the chase,—
  I follow, follow still: But I
  Shall never see her face.
  • Frederick Locker-Lampson, The Unrealized Ideal.

• Sed ut acerbum est, pro benefactis quom malis messem metas!
  • It is a bitter disappointment when you have sown benefits, to reap injuries.
  • Plautus, Epidicus, V, 2, 52.