Quotes about Approval

You cannot love anything or anyone more than you love yourself and you can't love yourself unless you see yourself whole. If you secretly disapprove of any part of yourself, you will secretly hate part of the One who made you. Can you understand that?

It seems as though we Christians have developed a nasty habit of leading people into a radical encounter with God's unconditional love, forgiveness, acceptance, and union only to spend the ensuing years teaching them how to become close to God to earn his approval.

Everyone wanted to be the best. Best student. Best servant. Best Christian. They got caught up in it, pressing and pushing until they forgot whom it was they were trying to please.

The return to the "Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name" allows me to let my dad be no less than the good, loving, but limited human being he is, and to let my heavenly Father be the God whose unlimited, unconditional love melts away all resentments and anger and makes me free to love beyond the need to please or find approval.

I am prone to reshape and refashion things to try and please as many people as I can, to get as many nods or smiles out of as many people as possible.

If what I do pleases God, it is always the right thing to do, and I can stop worrying about everyone else's reactions. This dramatically simplifies life.

We spend too much time wondering what others may have thought about our outfit or the comment we made in the small group meeting. We see opportunities to testify about Christ, but we avoid them. We are more concerned about looking stupid (a fear of people) than we are about acting sinfully (fear of the Lord).

We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we've been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval.

You want the praise of people who kick themselves every 15 minutes. The praise of people who despise themselves?

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can't go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.

We worry that we're not in the right emotional moment to do our work. And mostly, we give away our agency, begging someone, anyone, to do the hard part of summoning the muse or getting us approval or a gig or support so that we can maybe, just maybe, feel the light again. It's a trap. Flow is the result of effort. The muse shows up when we do the work. Not the other way around. Set up your tools, turn off the internet, and go back to work.