Dallas Willard Feelings Quotations

Feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence.

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.

In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn't! It's in the mind - how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It's in our feelings. It's in our body.

Does Christ commend the famous 'apathy' of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.

We don't save our soul and leave our emotions and our feelings and our body and all the rest of it out. That's just a way of talking that emphasizes the soul is so fundamental that we can, in some cases, treat it as the whole person because it actually is the thing that integrates all of these aspects of the self and makes them work together. Now, I don't think we can find a passage in the Bible that says that. We have to read and study how it addresses the soul, and we then see that it is the deepest, most vital part of the human self.

Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.