Willard Quotes & Sayings

One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity. — J. Willard Gibbs

To glorify God means to think and act in such a way that the goodness, greatness, and beauty of God are constantly obvious to ourselves and all those around us.
It means to live in such a way that when people see us they think, Thank God for God, if God would create such a life. — Dallas Willard

I'd like to do 'Saturday Night Live.' — Willard Scott

I can't give you what you need right now, but I will promise you that one day I'll give you not only my heart, but my soul. I never want to see the sadness in your eyes, as I do right this moment. Let that fire shine, and one day soon I hope you take a chance on me again. — A.M. Willard

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become. — Dallas Willard

Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life. — Frances E. Willard

As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn't running the universe and does not get to have things as they please. — Dallas Willard

The microscopic world became my obsession. — Willard Wigan

Dallas Willard warns us too of the "cost of non-discipleship." We may be able to live with some pain, but when our whole self becomes more and more rotten, the cost is far greater than dealing with the problem as soon as possible. This is why I think following Jesus, though challenging, is much easier than following anything else. The world has nothing better to offer me. Jesus has come to right my wrongs and to make me refreshingly new. — Dallas Willard

The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings. It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal. — Dallas Willard

Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation — Willard Van Orman Quine

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it. — Willard Van Orman Quine

I realize that I will either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and will cut him down accordingly, or I will allow my view of God to determine my view of the evil and will elevate him accordingly, accepting that nothing is beyond his power for good. — Dallas Willard

People who love one another can be silent together.12 — Dallas Willard

Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The world that contains the possibility of evil is the one that also contains the greatest possibility of good. And the question of why God allows evil to happen has to be put against the question of what a world where evil could not happen would be like. It's by working on those questions that people can come to some resolution in their minds about the reality of evil and what it means. — Dallas Willard

To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives. — Dallas Willard

The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Obedience to Christ is the easy way, take my yoke ... — Dallas Willard

They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many. — Donald Ray Pollock

It is possible to have the administration of the sacraments and the preaching of the Word of God and to have it be simply a human exercise. — Dallas Willard

I'm a country boy. — Willard Scott

Eliminate the cause of a mistake. Don't just clean it up. — J. Willard Marriott

That's because those pages got torn to shreds when you left, now you both are in different chapters. He wants you - like always, and you want the hot guy down the street. Typical Frankie and Brody style. You guys dance one wild tango, if you ask me. — A.M. Willard

Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet themeanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases. — Willard Van Orman Quine

There is a child in all of us. — Willard Wigan

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

This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time. — Frances E. Willard

As a kid, I lived in a fantasy world. I used to believe ants could talk. Not once did they say thank you. — Willard Wigan

I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to. — Willard Gaylin

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent. — Sylvia Plath

Everything I've ever done in my life has been a fluke. — Willard Scott

Heroism, generally, is totally out of place in the spiritual life, until we grow to the point at which it would never be thought of as heroism anyway. — Dallas Willard

Our search for safety and contentment is endless and inexhaustible precisely because of the intrinsic futility of relying on human abilities to provide resolution to our problems. — Dallas Willard

And yet the Nobel Prizes, in singling out individuals, have done a great deal of good in pointing up to the world as a whole and setting forth clearly goals for achievement. — Willard Libby

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command. — Dallas Willard

Suddenly you're like a pirate, you're 65 years old and you've got an earring. — Fred Willard

We hope that this honor you have done us will bring the time of further realization of these benefits closer and will help all mankind to live better and be happier through the atom and isotopes. — Willard Libby

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

Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe. — Frances E. Willard

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? ... If it fails to set a lovable God
a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being
before ordinary people, we have gone wrong — Dallas Willard

Do your best, and your best will be growing better. — Emma Willard

If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion. — Frances E. Willard

I think women can cope a lot better than men. — Willard Scott

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word. — Willard Van Orman Quine

What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, 'If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven,' there is no basis for discipleship. — Dallas Willard

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

It also explains why the gospel of the kingdom has such transforming power in human life. For that gospel opens the kingdom to everyone, no matter their classification, and it enables us really to become a different kind of person, beyond all condemnation, blame, and shame, and to know it. Those who mourn, when they step into the kingdom of the heavens, are "given beauty in place of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of grief, and garments of praise in place of a spirit of despair" (Isa. 61:3). — Dallas Willard

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The — Dallas Willard

He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed. — Dallas Willard

I want to get my own show because 'Today' will eventually get tired of me, or the audience will get tired of me. — Willard Scott

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. — Frances E. Willard

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings. — Dallas Willard

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy. — Willard Van Orman Quine

But the truth about obedience in the kingdom of Jesus, as should be clear by now, is that it really is abundance. Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance. They are not two separate things. The inner condition of the soul from which strength and love and peace flow is the very same condition that generously blesses the oppressor and lovingly offers the other cheek. These Christlike behaviors are expressions of a pervasive personal strength and its joy, not of weakness, morbidity, sorrow - or raw exertion of will - as is so often assumed. And — Dallas Willard

Projects of personal transformation rarely if ever succeed by accident, drift or imposition. — Dallas Willard

Make a child a painting and he'll be happy for a day. Teach a child to paint and he'll be miserable for a lifetime. — Christopher Willard

[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity. (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning) — Dallas Willard

The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God. — Dallas Willard

All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory. — Willard Gaylin

She's a pistol that if you don't learn how to point and shoot properly. The back fire could be hazardous to your health or life. — A.M. Willard

To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. — Willard Gaylin

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it. — Dallas Willard

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead. — Dallas Willard

What we can accomplish as good as it may be does not compare to what God can accomplish — Dallas Willard

The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus. — Dallas Willard

Leo Tolstoy's A Confession is possibly the most important document of the last two centuries for understanding our current plight. The dogmas of modern unbelief had captured his elite circle of Russian intellectuals, artists, and members of the social upper crust, and the implications of it slowly destroyed the basis of his life. On those dogmas only two things are real: particles and progress. "Why do I live?" he asked. And the answer he got was, "In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth". — Dallas Willard

Lord, you will have to be our teacher, because the dignity has been drained out of us in so many ways. We have been treated like dirt, and that has stuck on us. We've put ourselves against standards of our own making, because we thought it would give us worth. Please touch each person with how unique they are in your eyes and how their dignity in your eyes is so great that you will not even override them; you will woo them and pursue them and help them to accept that you are seeking them and you will allow yourself to be found by them if they simply cry out for help. I pray that great freedom will come across them because of their awareness of where they stand in your kingdom. That will make Jesus very happy, and the angels in heaven will jump up and down. And so we say, Let it be so, and that's what we mean by amen. Amen. Dallas Willard — Dallas Willard

My work knocks people out; you've not seen the best of me yet. — Willard Wigan

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. — Dallas Willard

Mongols were "a race of people on the path to extinction, incapable of progress, doomed to be swallowed up by their neighbors. — Willard Sunderland

As an exercise bicycling is superior to most, if not all, others at our command. It takes one into the outdoor air; it is entirely under control; can be made gentle or vigorous as one desires; is active and not passive; takes the rider outside of himself and the thoughts and cares of his daily work; develops his will, his attention, his courage and independence; and makes pleasant what is otherwise irksome. — Frances E. Willard

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

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science. — Walter M. Elsasser

There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve. — Dallas Willard

Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. — Dallas Willard

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat ... I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. — Sylvia Plath

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys. (I can hardly take in these beautiful little creatures one at a time.) We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life. — Dallas Willard

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work? — Dallas Willard

Imagine that you had discovered gold or oil on a certain property, and no one else knew about it. Can you see yourself being sad and feeling deprived for having to gather all your resources and sacrifice them in order to buy that property? Hardly. Now you know what it is like to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus. — Dallas Willard

We Christians should be aware that there's something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn't have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture. — Dallas Willard

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
[Carnap's famous plea for tolerance to which W.V. Quine took exception.] — Rudolf Carnap

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person. — Dallas Willard

I'm not the dumbest guy that ever lived. — Willard Scott

Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today ... They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. — Dallas Willard

Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Viewers figure, 'Uncle Willard doesn't know any more about the weather than I do.' They're right. — Willard Scott

God is not mean, but he is dangerous. — Dallas Willard

You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent. — Dallas Willard

Malice or desire and intention to harm is often rooted in how we think about the persons concerned: our images of them, the inferences we habitually draw about them, and so forth. Perhaps we see them only as an obstacle to our desires, or as less than "human," as worthless. Perhaps we need to take steps toward seeing them as objects of God's love, or as beings of intrinsic value, like our own children or grandchildren or others we delight in. That will, in turn, require changes in how we think about our world and our self. All of this may be helped along by getting to know them, seeing what their life is like, or serving them. — Dallas Willard

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life. — Sylvia Plath

When I can, I do 25 minutes of calisthenics every day. — Willard Scott

Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual's character or of the life that lies endlessly before — Dallas Willard

Here's some soul homework, by way of Dallas Willard: If you want to really experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation [around work or relationship or whose kids are the highest achieving or looks or whatever], pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself. Really pull for them and rejoice in their success. If Christians were universally to do this for each other, the earth would soon be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God. — John Ortberg

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

The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness. — Dallas Willard

The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory? ... A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge. — Dallas Willard

Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible. — Dallas Willard