Quotes by Neal A. Maxwell

“If we entertain temptations, soon they begin entertaining us!”

“Patience permits us to cling to our faith in the Lord when we are tossed about by suffering as if by surf. When the undertow grasps us we will realize that we are somehow being carried forward even as we tumble. We are actually being -helped even as we cry for help.”

Each of us is an innkeeper who decides if there is room for Jesus!

Gods extraordinary work is most often done by ordinary people in the seeming obscurity of a home and family.

The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.

I testify that He is utterly incomparable in what He is, what He knows, what He has accomplished and what He has experienced. Yet, movingly, He calls us His Friends

There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.

Faith in God includes Faith in Gods timing.

It is extremely important for you to believe in yourselves not only for what you are now but for what you have the power to become. Trust in the Lord as He leads you along. He has things for you to do that you wont know about now but that will unfold later. If you stay close to Him, You will have some great adventures. You will live in a time where instead of sometimes being fulfilled, many of them will actually be fulfilled. The Lord will unfold your future bit by bit.

Within what is allotted to us, we can have spiritual contentment.

Perfect love is perfectly patient.

Elder Maxwell on Wintry DoctrinesElder Maxwell said that “if we are serious about our discipleship Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are most difficult for us to do.”This was what he came to call the wintry doctrine at the funeral of a young father in 1996 he put it this way “There are in the gospel warm and cuddly doctrines and then there are some that are just outright wintry doctrines… one of them frankly is that we cannot approach real consecration without passing through appropriate clinical experiences because we don’t achieve consecration in the abstract. … sometimes therefore the best people have the worst experiences… because they are the most ready to learn.” (Bruce C. Hafen, The Story of A Disciple’s Life: Preparing the Biography of Neal A. Maxwell, p. 14)

Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.

Be careful, fathers, when you inordinately desire things to be better for your children than they were for you. Do not, however unintentionally, make things worse by removing the requirement for reasonable work as part of their experience, thereby insulating your children from the very things that helped make you what you are.

Sir Thomas More was a victim of injustice and irony. Generously and meekly, just as he was about to be martyred, he said: Paul . . . was present, and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they [Stephen and Paul] now both twain Holy Saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, so I verily trust and . . . pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation.

What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.

We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.

A patient willingness to defer dividends is a hallmark of individual maturity.

There is also a dimension of patience which links it to a special reverence for life. Patience is a willingness, in a sense, to watch the unfolding purposes of God with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than pacing up and down within the cell of our circumstance. Put another way, too much anxious opening of the oven door and the cake falls instead of rising. So it is with us. If we are always selfishly taking our temperature to see if we are happy, we will not be.

Though we have rightly applauded our ancestors for their spiritual achievements (and do not and must not discount them now), those of us who prevail today will have done no small thing. The special spirits who have been reserved to live in this time of challenges and who overcome will one day be praised for their stamina by those who pulled handcarts.