Dallas Willard Quotes

People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it.

The depiction of the exterior as opposed [to] what you're feeling inside is always so different that it's impossible to know what is right.

How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?

The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

They call me 'sweet,' and 'gentle'; and some of the men go the length of calling me 'endearing,' and I laugh in my sleeve and think, 'Oh, Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!'

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

I am myself a fabulous fake.

I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

If I feel like I'm myself, then I'm very uncomfortable.

Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional and unafraid of being unattractive.

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; - although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

True conviction of sin--how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true.

So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?" "Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.