Quotes from Neal A. Maxwell

The issue for us is trusting God enough to trust also His timing. If we can truly believe He has our welfare at heart, may we not let His plans unfold as He thinks best? The same is true with the second coming and with all those matters wherein our faith needs to include faith in the Lord's timing for us personally, not just in His overall plans and purposes.

As parenting declines, the need for policing increases. There will always be a shortage of police if there is a shortage of effective parents! Likewise, there will not be enough prisons if there are not enough good homes.

He knows that having put his hand to the plow he must not look back, because when we are looking back, we are also holding back.

We were never promised precision in this life... With the gift of agency to mankind, life cannot possibly present a perfectly tidy picture. The ambiguities of circumstances are partly, if not largely, the cumulative result of our varied use of our moral agency, but also of the structure of life itself.

He sees that only the gospel can really help us avoid the painful excesses in the tug-of-war between the need for liberty and the need for order. He knows, for instance, that true law enforcement depends on the policing of one's self. If the sentry of self fails, there are simply not enough other policemen to restrain those who will not restrain themselves, and beating the system will become the system.

The day will come, brothers and sisters, when we will have other books of scripture which will emerge to accompany the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Presently you and I carry our scriptures around in a "quad"; the day will come when you'll need a little red wagon.

When man has reached the periphery of the spiderweb of his own reason and logic, he can find the ropes of revelation upon which he can climb upward forever and ever.

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).

Alas, in our age, some arrogantly believe that if they cannot comprehend something, then God cannot comprehend it, either.

How many planets are there in the universe with people on them? We don't know, but we are not alone in the universe! God is not the God of only one planet! I testify that Jesus is truly the Lord of the universe, "that by [Christ], and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God" D&C 76:24

In some precious and personal moments there are brief, sudden surges of recognition of an immortal insight, a doctrinal deja vu. These flashes from the mirror of memory can remind us and inspire us, especially in the midst of life's taxing telestial traffic jams, which can otherwise cause us to grow weary and faint in our minds.

As to remedying our personal mistakes, we face no hindering traffic jams on the road of repentance. It is a toll road, not a freeway, and applying Christ's Atonement will speed us along.

If we entertain temptations, soon they begin entertaining us!

The "man of Christ" knows that the collapse of systems is always preceded by the collapse of individuals. Camelot began to give way to the world the moment Lancelot and Guinevere gave way to their appetites.

Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God's astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible. Amid the mortal and fragmentary communiques and the breaking news of the day concerning various human conflicts, God lives in an eternal now where the past, present, and future are constantly before Him (see D&C 130:7).

In any case, if recognition arising from proximate circumstances based upon fleeting criteria constitutes the sole measure of our personal significance, recognition will be both mercurial and insufficient.

People who spend their time searching for feet of clay will miss not only the heavens wherein God moves in His majesty and power, but God's majesty as He improves and shapes a soul.

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.

In order for men to partake of the fruit of felicity,they must plant the seeds thereof.

Work is always a spiritual necessity even if, for some, work is not an economic necessity.

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.

As George MacDonald wisely wrote, "The one principle of hell is, I am my own!" 4 Fierce pride usually protects this wrong perception.

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.

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.