Truman G. Madsen
“Now, what of today? Perhaps we can credit the computer for our increasing impatience. This generation is intent on what they want and how they want it and when. Don't wait for next week. Forget others. Forget nonsense about rules. Play the game your way. Cut corners. Make your own rules. We may be in the midst of the most impatient generation in history. But the truth is that all supernal joys take time and discipline and discipleship.”
"The Joy of the Lord Is Your Strength" (Nehemiah 8:10)
- This speech is found at http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=1004
Mary the Mother of Jesus
“My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour…For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.”
- Luke 1:46-47 and 49-55
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“My dear sisters, I have a simple faith. I believe that as you are faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, as you draw closer to Him in faith, hope, and charity, things will work together for your good.14 I believe that as you immerse yourselves in the work of our Father—as you create beauty and as you are compassionate to others—God will encircle you in the arms of His love.15 Discouragement, inadequacy, and weariness will give way to a life of meaning, grace, and fulfillment.
As spirit daughters of our Heavenly Father, happiness is your heritage.
You are choice daughters of our Heavenly Father, and through the things you create and by your compassionate service, you are a great power for good. You will make the world a better place. Lift up your chin; walk tall. God loves you. We love and admire you.
Of this I testify, and leave you my blessing as an Apostle of the Lord, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
General Women’s Conference 2008 President Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s talk, Happiness is Your Heritage
Charlotte Mason
“The Essence of Christianity is Loyalty to a Person- Christ, our King. Here is a thought that unseals the fountains of love and loyalty, the treasures of faith and imagination, bound up in the child. The very essence of Christianity is personal loyalty, passionate loyalty to our adorable Chief.”
- The Charlotte Mason Companion pg. 20
Neal A. Maxwell
“The Lord’s work is work, but it is sweet labor. It is work usually done step by step in the process of time. Small daily duties well done have led to a big difference in just decades, for it is by small means that the Lord can bring about great things. There is no easy way to rush to righteousness. It is as if our very neighbor is all mankind, and thus we can see how much there is yet to do in the combining of our time and talents before we can truly be said to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
- From his short work called, Of One Heart, The Glory of the City of Enoch, pg. 23
Mother Teresa
"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
- Quote found at http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa
Jeffrey R. Holland
“Love. Healing. Help. Hope. The power of Christ to counter all troubles in all times-including the end of times. This is the safe harbor God wants for us in personal or public days of despair. That is the message with which the Book of Mormon begins, and that is the message with which it ends, calling all to “come unto Christ, and be perfected in him.” That phrase-taken from Moroni’s final lines of testimony, written 1,000 years after Lehi’s vision-is a dying man’s testimony of the only true way.”
- Sunday Afternoon General Conferenc talk, October 2009, Safety for the Soul by Jeffrey R. Holland,
THOMAS JEFFERSON
"The religion builders have so distorted the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers. . . . Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger persons to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages."
Jefferson's Complete Works, vol. 7. pp. 210 and 257 -letter to Dr Benjamin Waterhouse July 19, 1822
Spencer J. Condie
“Each of us, like George Frideric Handel, is engaged in a creative spiritual enterprise in this life…I pray that we may be sensitive to inspiration from on high, that we may be inspired in such a way that the fruits of our labors are inspiring to others…In her epic poem, Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed the eloquent thought: Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
“May each of us unlatch our shoes and cram our labors with the essence of heaven, and may none of us be found plucking blackberries when a much grander and loftier work needs to be done. And at the end of our divinely ordained days, may we be able to acknowledge, with Handel, that God has visited us in our labors.”
- Elder Spencer J. Condie’s talk Handel and the Gift of the Messiah, December Ensign 2010
Victor Hugo
“Javert felt that something horrible, admiration for a convict, was entering his soul. Respect for a galley-slave, is it possible? He shuddered at it, and could not escape from it, although he struggled! He was reduced to confess in his soul the sublimity of this villain, and this was odious. A benevolent malefactor, a compassionate, gentle, helping , and merciful convict, repaying good for evil, pardon for hatred, preferring pity to hatred, ready to destroy himself sooner than his enemy, saving the man who had struck him, kneeling on the pinnacle of virtue, and nearer to the angels than to man. Javert was constrained to confess to himself that such a monster existed.”
- Les Miserables page 862 in a 1864 or 1879 original English version
Joseph Smith
“Those who cannot endure persecution, and stand in the day of affliction, cannot stand in the day when the Son of God shall burst the veil, and appear in all the glory of His Father, with the holy angels.”
Joseph Smith the Prophet by Truman G. Madsen
MARTIN LUTHER
"I have sought nothing beyond reforming the Church in conformity with the Holy Scriptures. The spiritual powers have been not only corrupted by sin, but absolutely destroyed; so that there is now nothing in them but a depraved reason and a will that is the enemy and opponent of God. I simply say that Christianity has ceased to exist among those who should have preserved it."
In Galat. (1535) Weins IX, P.I. 293, 24-27, p. 50, Luther and his Times, p. 509, Martin Luther, p.188.
Jeanne of Arc
“She said that if she declared God had not sent her she would damn herself, for in truth she was sent from God.”
- This is an online transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial at age 19, transcribed from the original French to Latin and then to English. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/joanofarc-trial.html
Marvin Goldstein
Marvin Goldstein’s testimony that his life is the Lord’s. Around 20 minutes into the interview Marvin tells how Marvin J. Ashton set him apart to be a “missionary for life” with his music, a truly singular event.
http://radio.lds.org/programs/everything-creative-discussion-44?lang=eng#d
Abraham Lincoln
“We are indeed going through a trial-a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will; and that it might be so, I have sought his aid-but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.”
- Abraham Lincoln’s Daily Treasure, edited by Thomas Freiling, 253 (from ALincoln, God’s Humble Instrument by Ron L. Andersen pg. 4)
John Bunyan in Pilgram’s Progresss
The Pilgram, Christian speaking
“Ignorance is thy name, and as thy name is, so art thou; even this thy answer demonstrateth what I say. Ignorance thou art of what Justifying Righteousness is, and as ignorant how to secure thy Soul through the Faith of it from the heavy wrath of God. Yea, thou also art ignorant of the true effects of saving Faith in this Righteousness of Christ, which is to bow and win over the heart to God in Christ, to love his Name, his Word, Ways, and People, and not as thou ignorantly imaginest.”
Joseph F. Smith (Son of Hyrum and Mary Fielding)
“You don’t need to worry in the least, the Lord will take care of you and bless you. He will also take care of His servants, and will bless them and help them to accomplish His purposes; and all the powers of darkness combined in earth and in hell cannot prevent it…”
(Conference Report, October 1905, 5-6)
C. S. Lewis
“The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked-the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.’
- Mere Christianity page 196-197
Howard W. Hunter
“As members of the Church of Jesus Christ, we seek to bring all truth together. We seek to enlarge the circle of love and understanding among all the people of the earth. Thus we strive to establish peace and happiness, not only within Christianity but among all mankind.”
(That We Might Have Joy by Howard W. Hunter, page, 59)
George MacDonald quoted by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity page 205
I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of-throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.
Sheri Dew
“Every prophet from Adam to the current day has testified that Christ will life us up, if we will let Him (see Moroni 9:25:26). He will lift our sights, sharpen our vision, bless us with hope and peace of mind, and strengthen us with the resolve to rise above the world. It was so as the Nephite civilization crumbled. It is so today, as the moral underpinnings of our society rot with decay. The only answer to the challenge of mortality-the only place we can find the strength and peace we much have-is in the Lord Jesus Christ, whose atonement not only paid the price for sin but compensated for all the pain and bitterness we face along this part of the path.”
-No Doubt About It by Sheri Dew, page 178
George Washington
“But this man of great faith was not motivated to pray at Valley Forge simply because of the horrors of that winter. Washington prayed at Valley Forge in large part because it was his habit to pray. As his grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, later wrote, “Throughout the war, as it was understood in his military family, he gave a part of every day to private prayer and devotion.”
- The Real George Washington pg. 273
George Frederick Handel
“To the sponsors of the first performance of the oratorio, Handel stipulated that profits from this and all future performances of Messiah “be donated to prisoners, orphans, and the sick. I have myself been a very sick man, and am now cured,” he said. “I was a prisoner, and have been set free.” 6
Following the first London performance of Messiah, a patron congratulated Handel on the excellent “entertainment.”
“My lord, I should be sorry if I only entertained them,” Handel humbly replied. “I wish to make them better.” 7
- Elder Spencer J. Condie’s talk Handel and the Gift of the Messiah, December Ensign 2010
Eliza R. Snow
O my Father, thou that dwellest
In the high and glorious place,
When shall I regain thy presence
And again behold thy face?
- O My Father, by Eliza R. Snow, LDS Hymnal
Benjamin Franklin Constitutional Convention Address on Prayer
“Mr. President:
The small progress we have made after 4 or five weeks close attendance & continual reasonings with each other -- our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ays, is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own wont of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed Modern States all round Europe, but find none of their Constitutions suitable to our circumstances.
In this situation of this Assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. -- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance.
I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall be become a reproach and a bye word down to future age. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.
I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.”
I found this speech at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/benfranklin.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment