Neal A. Maxwell Quotes

When great individuals move so marvelously along the straight and narrow path, it is unseemly of us to call attention to the fact that one of their shoelaces is untied as they make the journey.

How could there be refining fires without our enduring some heat?

I find that goal setting, when done this way, leads to goal achieving. The chronic failure to achieve goals lowers self-esteem. Show me a failure to achieve a goal, and usually I can show you the violation of one or more of the above criteria. Imposed goals, vague goals, and unrealistic goals tend to produce only partial successes and outright failures.

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.

It is so easy to be confrontive without being informative; indignant without being intelligent; impulsive without being insightful.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

When in situations of stress we wonder if there is any more in us to give, we can be comforted to know that God, who knows our capacity perfectly, placed us here to succeed

Men’s and nations’ finest hour consist of those moments when extraordinary challenge is met by extraordinary response. Hence in those darkest hours, we must light our individual candles rather than vying with others to call attention to the enveloping darkness. Our indignation about injustice should lead to illumination, for if it does not, we are only adding to the despair-and the moment of gravest danger is when there is so little light that darkness seems normal!

Looking for honest ways to lift one another would . . . be more beneficial to our own self-esteem, for we would see more good in ourselves. We would cease to be so critical of our weaknesses and would find ways to allow our weaknesses to become strengths with God’s help.

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

If the nearly one-and-a-half million babies aborted in America each year could, somehow, vote, chameleon candidates would find fresh reason to be concerned about abortion, whereas now they are unconcerned.

So it is that real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting it be consumed! Such is the ‘sacrifice unto the Lord… of a broken heart and a contrite spirit,’ (D&C 59:8), a prerequisite to taking up the cross, while giving ‘away all [our] sins’ in order to ‘know God’ (Alma 22:18) for the denial of self precedes the full acceptance of Him.