Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “Keep eternity before the children.”

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

160. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

170. “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

171. “What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible.”

— Dallas Willard

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

179. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

181. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

183. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

190. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

192. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

195. “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

196. “We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.”

— Dallas Willard

197. “To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.”

— Dallas Willard

198. “Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life’s greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age.”

— Dallas Willard

199. “Denial – usually in some form of rationalization – is the primary device that humans use to deal with their own wrongness. It was the first thing out of the mouths of Adam and Eve after they sinned, and it continues up to the latest edition of the newspaper. The prophetic witness from God must throw itself against the massive weight of group and individual denial, often institutionalized and subtly built into our customary ways of speaking and interacting.”

— Dallas Willard

200. “The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul.”

— Dallas Willard