Top 100 Neal A. Maxwell Quotes
#1. The doctrine of foreordination is not a doctrine of repose; instead, it is a doctrine for second- and third-milers, and it will draw out of them the last full measure of devotion. It is a doctrine for the deep believer but it will bring only scorn from the skeptic.
Neal A. Maxwell
#2. The charity of good women is such that their 'love makes no parade'; they are not glad 'when others go wrong'; they are too busy serving to sit statusfully about, waiting to be offended.
Neal A. Maxwell
#3. 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
Neal A. Maxwell
#4. Obviously, family values mirror our personal priorities. Given the gravity of current conditions, would parents be willing to give up just one outside thing, giving that time and talent instead to the family.
Neal A. Maxwell
#5. The flame of family can warm us and at the same time be a perpetual pilot light to rekindle us.
Neal A. Maxwell
#6. Do not write a check with your tongue that your actions cannot cash.
Neal A. Maxwell
#8. A new calling can beckon us away from comfortable routine and from competencies already acquired.
Neal A. Maxwell
#9. The gross size of our talent inventories is less important than the net use of our talents?
Neal A. Maxwell
#10. We are often not only to slow to get on our knees, but to quick to rise from them.
Neal A. Maxwell
#11. The more seriously we work on our own imperfections, the less we are judgemental of the imperfections of others.
Neal A. Maxwell
#12. When we feel so alone, we cannot presume to teach him who, at the apogee of his agony, trod "the winepress alone" anything about feeling forsaken.
Neal A. Maxwell
#13. The submission of one's will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God's altar. The many other things we 'give' are actually the things He has already given or loaned to us.
Neal A. Maxwell
#15. Letting off steam always produces more heat than light.
Neal A. Maxwell
#17. Meekness, the subtraction of self, reduces the multiplication of words.
Neal A. Maxwell
#18. Those who believe for a while make only a brief tour in the kingdom, though thereafter they often feel qualified to inform those who know even less about the Church; but the fact is they were really only tourists - not natives who really knew the kingdom's countryside.
Neal A. Maxwell
#19. Sometimes, if you're like me, [God] will brace or reprove in a highly personal process not understood or appreciated by those outside the context.
Neal A. Maxwell
#20. Love, patience, and meekness can be just as contagious as rudeness and crudeness.
Neal A. Maxwell
#21. Our God does not indulge us, but He is merciful toward our weaknesses as He strives to tutor us.
Neal A. Maxwell
#22. He is conscious of the past and present injustices, but he knows that real remedies are to be found in contemporary Christian compassion, and not in compensatory justice.
Neal A. Maxwell
#23. We can't dwell upon another's ingratitude without using up our time and talents unprofitably.
Neal A. Maxwell
#24. When our minds really catch hold of the significance of Jesus' atonement, the world's hold on us loosens.
Neal A. Maxwell
#25. Spent time-like a spent bullet-tells us much about its "processor." for we see not only the residual slug, but indicators of how spent time is grooved by a man's soul, a reliable indicator of what a man is like.
Neal A. Maxwell
#27. It is left to each of us to balance contentment regarding what God has allotted to us in life with some divine discontent resulting from what we are in comparison to what we have the power to become.
Neal A. Maxwell
#29. Sometimes we are so busy being the hammer or the anvil, that we forget who really needs the shaping.
Neal A. Maxwell
#30. In order for men to partake of the fruit of felicity,they must plant the seeds thereof.
Neal A. Maxwell
#32. It is not the years but the changes that make us grow.
Neal A. Maxwell
#33. It takes faith, too, and obedience, to conquer selfishness, that unsubmissive characteristic which, if unchecked, produces profound personal melancholy and solitariness. Selfishness is a form of self-worship, and we have been told, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me" (Exodus 20:3).
Neal A. Maxwell
#34. Each of us is an innkeeper who decides if there is room for Jesus!
Neal A. Maxwell
#35. As George MacDonald wisely wrote, "The one principle of hell is, I am my own!" 4 Fierce pride usually protects this wrong perception.
Neal A. Maxwell
#36. Personal, spiritual symmetry emerges only from the shaping of prolonged obedience. Twigs are bent, not snapped into shape.
Neal A. Maxwell
#37. The enlarging of the soul requires not only some remodeling, but some excavating.
Neal A. Maxwell
#38. A vague goal is no goal at all. The Ten Commandments wouldn't be very impressive, for instance, if they weren't specific, but simply were couched in a phraseology such as 'thou shalt not be a bad person.
Neal A. Maxwell
#39. Just as doubt, despair, and desensitization go together, so do faith, hope, and charity. The latter, however, must be carefully and constantly nurtured, whereas despair, like dandelions, needs so little encouragement to sprout and spread. Despair comes so naturally to the natural man!
Neal A. Maxwell
#40. In contrast to the path of selfishness, there is no room for road rage on the straight and narrow way.
Neal A. Maxwell
#41. The truth is that not yet usually means never. Trying to run away from the responsibility to decide about Christ is childish. Pilate sought to refuse responsibility for deciding about Christ, but Pilate's hands were never dirtier than just after he had washed them.
Neal A. Maxwell
#43. Unproductive worry - like Parkinson's proverbial law - tends to expand to fill the time available.
Neal A. Maxwell
#44. I know the celestial criteria measure service, not status; the use of our talents, not the relative size of our talent inventories. I know that Church membership is not passive security but continuing opportunity.
Neal A. Maxwell
#45. If we knew how often the obedience of others is affected by our own, and how often our stepping forth soon brings forth a whole platton of helpers, and how often our speaking forth soon creates a chorus - we would be even more ashamed of our slackess and our silence.
Neal A. Maxwell
#46. You must not mistake passing local cloud cover, for general darkness.
Neal A. Maxwell
#47. We must not fail, individually, for if we fail, we fail twice - for ourselves and for those who could have been helped, if we had done our duty.
Neal A. Maxwell
#48. Regarding trials, including of our faith and patience, there are no exemptions-only variations.
Neal A. Maxwell
#49. The harrowing of the soul can be like the harrowing of the soil; to increase the yield, things are turned upside down.
Neal A. Maxwell
#50. Conscience warns us not to sink our cleats too deeply in mortal turf, which is so dangerously artificial.
Neal A. Maxwell
#51. Endurance involves much more than putting up with a situation; Patient Endurance is more than pacing up and down within the cell of circumstance. True Enduring represents not merely the passage of time, ... but the Passage of Soul.
Neal A. Maxwell
#52. We are so busy constantly checking our own temperatures, we fail to notice the burning fevers of others.
Neal A. Maxwell
#53. We, more than others, should carry jumper and tow cables not only in our cars, but also in our hearts, by which means we can send the needed boost or charge of encouragement or the added momentum to mortal neighbors.
Neal A. Maxwell
#54. Work is always a spiritual necessity even if, for some, work is not an economic necessity.
Neal A. Maxwell
#55. At times God's best pupils experience the most rigorous and continuous courses. Eventually those who prove to be men of Christ will thereby become distinguished alumni of life's school of affliction, graduating with honors.
Neal A. Maxwell
#57. The "new" in us is bound to notice the "old" that remains.
Neal A. Maxwell
#58. A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.
Neal A. Maxwell
#59. If we spent as much time lifting our children as we do criticizing them, how effectively we could help them to see themselves in a more positive light!
Neal A. Maxwell
#60. When at length we tire of putting people down, this self-inflicted fatigue can give way to the invigorating calisthenics of lifting people up.
Neal A. Maxwell
#61. The imperfections of others never release us from the need to work on our own shortcomings.
Neal A. Maxwell
#62. We could not learn love in the abstract any more than we could learn patience and the other cardinal virtues. Just as we cannot know the "fellowship of his sufferings" without suffering, we also come to know real fellowship with our fellowmen only by serving them.
Neal A. Maxwell
#63. Why is it that for many persons changing others is so exciting and so relevant, while changing oneself is so boring and irrelevant?
Neal A. Maxwell
#64. Those who turn against the Church do so to play to their own private gallery, but when, one day, the applause has died down and the cheering has stopped, they will face a smaller audience, the judgment bar of God.
Neal A. Maxwell
#65. Joshua didn't say choose you next year whom you will serve; he spoke of "this day," while there is still daylight and before the darkness becomes more and more normal.
Neal A. Maxwell
#66. If the kingdom of God is not first, it doesn't matter what's second.
Neal A. Maxwell
#68. Without gospel truths, man's efforts to reach his goals are like the northbound explorer who drove his dog sled feverishly northward on an ice pack that was flowing southward - only to find himself farther from his destination at the end of a hard day's journey than he had been at dawn!
Neal A. Maxwell
#69. No love is ever wasted. Its worth does not lie in reciprocity.
Neal A. Maxwell
#70. Consecration thus constitutes the only unconditional surrender which is also a total victory!
Neal A. Maxwell
#71. Within what is allotted to us, we can have spiritual contentment.
Neal A. Maxwell
#72. Our little pebble of poor performance helps to start, or to sustain, an avalanche.
Neal A. Maxwell
#73. 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.
Neal A. Maxwell
#74. In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.
Neal A. Maxwell
#75. 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.
Neal A. Maxwell
#76. Without making a fetish of goal setting, and without letting "lists" of tasks we desire to do dominate us, some recording of goals is wise not only for the self-reminder these constitute, but also for the satisfaction of crossing things off.
Neal A. Maxwell
#79. Crowds cannot make right what God has declared to be wrong.
Neal A. Maxwell
#80. How could there be refining fires without our enduring some heat?
Neal A. Maxwell
#81. 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.
Neal A. Maxwell
#82. Ironically, brothers and sisters, the natural man who is so very selfish in so many ordinary ways is strangely unselfish in that he reaches for too few of the things that bring real joy. He settles for a mess of pottage instead of eternal joy.
Neal A. Maxwell
#83. The authority of example and considerations of character, unlike pudding, are not whipped up in an instant.
Neal A. Maxwell
#84. Though events set up the defining moments which can evoke profiles in righteousness, outward commotions cannot excuse any failure of inward resolve, even if some seem to unravel so easily.
Neal A. Maxwell
#85. Even the early droplets of selfish decisions suggest a direction. Then the little inflecting rivulets come, merging into small brooks and soon into larger streams; finally one is swept along by a vast river which flows into the "gulf of misery and endless wo" (Hel. 5:12).
Neal A. Maxwell
#86. When we don't like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak about killing a baby within the womb, but about "termination of potential life." Words are often multiplied to try to cover dark deeds.
Neal A. Maxwell
#87. Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.
Neal A. Maxwell
#88. Most of our suffering comes from sin and stupidity; it is, nevertheless, very real, and growth can occur with real repentance. But the highest source of suffering appears to be reserved for the innocent who undergo divine tutorial training.
Neal A. Maxwell
#89. No part of walking by faith is more difficult than walking the road of repentance. However, with 'faith unto repentance', we can push the roadblock of pride away and beg God for mercy. One simply surrenders, worrying only about what God thinks, not about what 'they' think.
Neal A. Maxwell
#90. We must endure the contempt of others without reciprocating that contempt.
Neal A. Maxwell
#92. How myopic it is to view His ministry as all crucifixion and no resurrection!
Neal A. Maxwell
#94. True discipleship is for volunteers only. Only volunteers will trust the Guide sufficiently to follow Him in the dangerous ascent which only He can lead.
Neal A. Maxwell
#95. The Lord doesn't ask about your ability, only your availability; and, if you prove your dependability, the Lord will increase your capability.
Neal A. Maxwell
#96. God, as a loving Father, will stretch our souls at times. The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched ... God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference!
Neal A. Maxwell
#98. The more quickly we loosen our grip on the things of the world the more firmly we can take hold of the things of eternity.
Neal A. Maxwell
#99. It is only by yielding to God that we can begin to realize His will for us. And if we truly trust God, why not yield to His loving omniscience? After all, He knows us and our possibilities much better than do we.
Neal A. Maxwell
#100. Giving up on God and on oneself constitutes simultaneous surrender to the natural man.
Neal A. Maxwell
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