Quotes about Expectations

Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't Heaven, so don't expect it to be.

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.

In church politics, you're surprised when people are bad, while in secular politics you're surprised when people are good.

The kick in the teeth with fame is, when you don't have it, you beat yourself up for it because you don't have it, but when you have it, you are miserable and kill yourself for it.

Few people who marry plan for their marriages to fail, but neither do they specifically plan for success.

People who changed the world have declared independence from other people's expectations.

Once people grasp that the events of the Messiah's death and resurrection have transformed everything and that they are now living between that initial explosive event and God's final setting right of the world (when God is "all in all"), then everything will change: belief, behavior, attitudes, expectations, and not least a new love, a real sense of belonging, which springs up among those who share all this. That is what so much of Paul's writing is about.

Perhaps even "his own people"—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did.

There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return.

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

but at its heart we find this message: that the true signs of apostolic ministry are to be found in the things that show that the apostle is formed by the Messiah himself, the Messiah whose death overturned all cultural expectations as well as all forms of power.