Dallas Willard Quotes

Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way.

People on a spiritual path - personal growth, spiritual practice, recovery, yoga and so forth - are the last people who should be sitting out the social and political issues of our day. And there’s an important reason for this: People on such journeys are adepts at change. They know that the mechanics of the heart and mind are the fundamental drivers of transformation.

We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.

'Moonlight' has changed my life externally but also internally... spiritually as well.

The findings in contemporary social sciences are helping us understand that we can find other ways to educate people and act against injustice and corruption in our society.

The ultimate verification of our religion consists of the changed lives to which it can point and for which it is responsible.

We have real difficulty here because everyone thinks of changing the world, but where, oh where, are those who think of changing themselves? People may genuinely want to be good, but seldom are they prepared to do what it takes to produce the inward life of goodness that can form the soul. Personal formation into the likeness of Christ is arduous and lifelong.

The church ... is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

People must be changed...goodness cannot be legislated.

An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.

Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.

Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels. He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest.

Repentance is not completed by a single act, it must be incorporated into our mind, till it become a fixed state, arising from a continual sense of our need of it.

Fighting by itself doesn't interest me anymore. I want to help people, the black people and I need any kind of media to spread my thought: God, charity, peace.

I came to the conclusion that unless I found myself and became the change I wanted to see in the world - as Gandhi said - I couldn't contribute much, nor would there be anything fulfilling or meaningful in my life. So I went on a spiritual search.

You can often help others more by correcting your own faults than theirs. Remember, and you should, because of your own experience, that allowing God to correct your faults is not easy. Be patient with people, wait for God to work with them as He wills.

In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.

One simple change - seeking and finding peace within - could, if it were undertaken by everyone, end all wars, eliminate conflict and prevent injustice. World peace is a personal thing. What is needed is not a change of circumstance, but a change of consciousness.

Lord I'm Doing All I Can To Be A Better Man.

You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.

The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell!