Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

We are all prisoners at one time or another in our lives, prisoners to ourselves or to the expectations of those around us. It is a burden that all people endure, that all people despise, and that few people ever learn to escape.

Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

In America you're conditioned to regard everything as a contest. You have to make the Ten Best Dressed List, win this, win that. It drives me nuts sometimes. Who cares, for Christ's sake?

In many ways we were drugged when we were young. We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause.

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.

I don't want to have to be pretty. I don't want to have to be adorable.

People sometimes are afraid to be who they are because of other people's ideals.

I want people to like me, and I care what they think.

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.

I became an overachiever to get approval from the world.

The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't.

I want to show my true self, not how I want to be seen by others.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.

Once we begin chasing approval, we never stop running. It's servitude to a thousand masters instead of one to please.

I never realized how much I've become dependent on human approval until God took it away. I didn't even realize that I was in a self-made prison of human approval and human acceptance. Most of the prisons we live in we are not conscious of. God showed me Jesus plus nothing equals everything. And everything minus Jesus equals nothing. That set me free.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest.

Self respect beats social approval, every time.

It is my conviction that in general women are more snobbish and class conscious than men and that these ignoble traits are a product of men's attitude toward women and women's passive acceptance of this attitude.

Don't worry about society's conditioning and the labels that are put on you by external forces. Hold onto your true self.

I sometimes call this our "spacesuit self" because we come into an environment that is difficult and challenging, where we're told to be different. We're told to jump over hoops to be loved and appreciated, so we have to develop spacesuit strategies to get approval and create ways to avoid being judged.

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.