Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.”

— Dallas Willard

102. “Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.”

— Dallas Willard

103. “A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of.”

— Dallas Willard

104. “Reality is what you can count on.”

— Dallas Willard

105. “You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don’t think him competent.”

— Dallas Willard

106. “Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”

— Dallas Willard

107. “The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.”

— Dallas Willard

108. “Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.”

— Dallas Willard

109. “Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.”

— Dallas Willard

110. “A. W. Tozer expressed his “feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical Christian circles – the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to!”

— Dallas Willard

111. “We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.”

— Dallas Willard

112. “Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual’s character or of the life that lies endlessly before.”

— Dallas Willard

113. “Does Christ commend the famous ‘apathy’ of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.”

— Dallas Willard

114. “Clinical depression is an extreme form of a ‘bad mood.’”

— Dallas Willard

115. “We truly live at the mercy of our ideas; this is never more true than with our ideas about God.”

— Dallas Willard

116. “Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are.”

— Dallas Willard

117. “Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change. There the light of God first begins to move upon us through the word of Christ, and there the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to God and his way.”

— Dallas Willard

118. “Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are ‘societies’ of Jesus.”

— Dallas Willard

119. “Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God’s action in our lives.”

— Dallas Willard

120. “Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.”

— Dallas Willard

121. “You may be very sure that if your sincere intent is to glorify God and bless others in your efforts, and you are not motivated by unloving attitudes, you will see the hand of God move with you as you expectantly do your work. Your part is simply to expect it, watch for it, give thanks as you see it, and, on the basis of your experience, encourage others to do the same.”

— Dallas Willard

122. “Faith is not opposed to knowledge; faith is opposed to sight. And grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.”

— Dallas Willard

123. “Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.”

— Dallas Willard

124. “Spiritual formation into Christlikeness – true change of character – comes from living in relationship to God.”

— Dallas Willard

125. “We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.”

— Dallas Willard

126. “He said, “The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that’s what everybody will see; that’s what will get reproduced; that’s what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

— Dallas Willard

127. “We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: “the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth””

— Dallas Willard

128. “Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you’re going to do that, you’d better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle – a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.”

— Dallas Willard

129. “When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.”

— Dallas Willard

130. “What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.”

— Dallas Willard

131. “Similarly, a primary objective for Christian educators and a major task of professional pastors, if not the foremost task, should be the wholesale elimination of condemnation and anti-intellectualism from the local church.”

— Dallas Willard

132. “Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.”

— Dallas Willard

133. “In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.”

— Dallas Willard

134. “Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition.”

— Dallas Willard

135. “The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone. We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.”

— Dallas Willard

136. “The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.”

— Dallas Willard

137. “More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.”

— Dallas Willard

138. “Keep eternity before the children.”

— Dallas Willard

139. “When Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence.”

— Dallas Willard

140. “This impotence of “systems” is a main reason why Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today, which always strongly convey some elements of a human system. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity.”

— Dallas Willard

141. “The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.”

— Dallas Willard

142. “In solitude we find psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.”

— Dallas Willard

143. “Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of love. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.”

— Dallas Willard

144. “There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus – found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among his followers – and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him.”

— Dallas Willard

145. “Sin always splits the self to some degree, yes. You know that you have harmed yourself and others, but you probably are not going to come to terms with that because you’re carrying on a charade of righteousness, even if you don’t believe it. So confession is very deep in the process of discovering the soul.”

— Dallas Willard

146. “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.”

— Dallas Willard

147. “Anything done in anger can be done better without it!”

— Dallas Willard

148. “Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.”

— Dallas Willard

149. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the first chapter of his wonderful book Life Together, has a discussion of how Christians never meet one-on-one; they always meet under the presence of Christ. That’s the way we escape the dreadful habit that human beings have of sizing one another up. Does that identify anything that you are familiar with? It’s one of the most dreadful things in human life, and only the love of Christ and the presence of the kingdom can bring us beyond it.”

— Dallas Willard

150. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”

— Dallas Willard