Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “A disciple is someone who is learning by going through the process of change. All the things that we moan about and talk on and on about, such as pornography, divorce and drugs, are things that can be dealt with effectively only by bringing change into the mind and the spirit, into the will, into the body and into the fellowship of the person. Then people come out saying, “Who needs that stuff? I’ve got something much better than that.”

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

153. “Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.”

— Dallas Willard

154. “Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.”

— Dallas Willard

155. “Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.”

— Dallas Willard

156. “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” This.”

— Dallas Willard

157. “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

158. “Hell is not an ‘oops!’ or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.”

— Dallas Willard

159. “My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.”

— Dallas Willard

160. “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

161. “The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”

— Dallas Willard

162. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

165. “Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?”

— Dallas Willard

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart’s being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God’s action.”

— Dallas Willard

171. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

173. “Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have – the greatest need of collective humanity – is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.”

— Dallas Willard

174. “Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings. Most of what we think we see as the struggle OF faith is really the struggle to act as IF we had faith when in fact we do not.”

— Dallas Willard

175. “Father, we remember now that we are right here with you and that you are in our midst and that you love us and that you long for us to be healed and whole and that we do not do any of this on our own and that this universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be and that you are closer than the air we breathe. And so we ask that you would be at work now and help us and give us energy and openness and strength, and we pray this together in Jesus’ name. Amen. John Ortberg.”

— Dallas Willard

176. “Generally speaking we are in God’s will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us. And that leaves a lot of room for initiative on our part, which is essential: our individual initiatives are central to his will for us.”

— Dallas Willard

177. “I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, I merited this.”

— Dallas Willard

178. “Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good.”

— Dallas Willard

179. “Why is it,” comedian Lily Tomlin asks, “that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Such a response from ourselves or others to someone’s claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.”

— Dallas Willard

180. “G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.”

— Dallas Willard

181. “The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.”

— Dallas Willard

182. “May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.”

— Dallas Willard

183. “The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.”

— Dallas Willard

184. “Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.”

— Dallas Willard

185. “Those who have attained considerable spiritual stature are frequently noted for their “childlikeness.” What this really means is that they do not use their face and body to hide their spiritual reality. In their body they are genuinely present to those around them. That is a great spiritual attainment or gift.”

— Dallas Willard

186. “An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.”

— Dallas Willard

187. “A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?”

— Dallas Willard

188. “The so-called “right to privacy” of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.”

— Dallas Willard

189. “The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.”

— Dallas Willard

190. “Every single thing that Jesus taught us to do was something he had put into daily practice in circumstances just like ours.”

— Dallas Willard

191. “The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.”

— Dallas Willard

192. “Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations.”

— Dallas Willard

193. “To manipulate, drive or manage people is not the same thing as to lead them.”

— Dallas Willard

194. “What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.”

— Dallas Willard

195. “We are required to “bet our life” that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.”

— Dallas Willard

196. “The idea that you can trust Christ and not intend to obey him is an illusion generated by the prevalence of an unbelieving “Christian culture.”

— Dallas Willard

197. “Business is a primary arrangement on God’s part for people to love one another and serve one another.”

— Dallas Willard

198. “Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving I experience my strength, my wealth, my power.”

— Dallas Willard

199. “God’s presence is everywhere around us. God is able to penetrate intertwine himself within the fibers of the human self in such a way that those who are enveloped in His loving companionship will never be alone. page 59.”

— Dallas Willard

200. “Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil.”

— Dallas Willard