"Have
courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones;
and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep
in peace; God is awake."
Victor Hugo
"The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."
Charles DuBois
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Greek Proverb
"The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things."
-Henry Ward Beecher
"Ladies, place your heart in the hands of God and He will place it in the hands of a man who He believes deserves it."
Unknown
"The
master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work
and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his
information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly
knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at
whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or
playing. To him, he's always doing both."
James A. Michener
"Your body is the harp of your soul. And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds."
Khalil Gibran
"We were not sent to this world to do anything in which we cannot put our hearts."
John Ruskin
"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."
C.S. Lewis
"Believe.
Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you
have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from his own bow.
It
is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all
shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who ram the winds with
mournful wails of regret on their lips.
Believe as if your life depended on it, for indeed it does."
Richard L. Evans
"I
have wondered if I am trying to force a life. While the life I lead may
not match the picture in my head, perhaps the one offered me is just as
full of joy, its pigments just as bright, just not what I expected."
Richard L. Evans“To
love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will
certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of
keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one... lock it up
safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-
safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken;
it will become unbreakable, impenetrable,irredeemable.”
C.S. Lewis"You have to go whole-heartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having."
Frank Lloyd Wright
"Today we're younger than we're ever going to be"
Regina Spektor
“I’d
like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you
really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to
boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing,
or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy
circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their
situation because they are conditioned to a life of security,
conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace
of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous
spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a
man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes
from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no
greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to
have a new and different sun."
Jon Krakauer
Carlfred Broderick, in his book "My Parents
Married on a Dare", shares this personal experience that took place
while he was a stake president:
A woman came to him when he was a stake president for a blessing.
He said: "I had known this sister for years and in my judgment she
had made some very poor life choices. She had married a handsome,
charming young man who initially wasn't a member of the Church but joined
the church for her. She waited a year to marry him and then went
to the temple. It was the last time he ever went to the temple.
I knew he was a flake from the beginning. It didn't surprise me that
he soon returned to many of his pre-church habits.
There was a great
pain for this woman. A good, good woman, she kept in the church;
she kept in the kingdom; she suffered enormous pain because her husband
went back to gambling and drinking and other things that were unhappy and
unwholesome. But, the greater pain came when her children, having
these two models before them, began to follow him. They gradually
seemed to adopt his lifestyle, values, and attitude toward the Church and
toward sacred things. Although she never wavered from her own faith,
her family was slipping away from her.
As she asked me
for a blessing to sustain her in what to do with this awful situation in
which she found herself, my thoughts were, "Didn't you ask for this?
You married a guy who really didn't have any depth to him and raised your
kids too permissively. You should have fought harder to keep them
in church rather than letting them run off to racetracks." I had
all those judgments in my head when I laid my hands on her head.
The Lord told her of his love and his tender concern for her. He
acknowledged that he had given her (and that she had volunteered for) a
far, far harder task than He would like. (And, as he put in my mind,
a harder task than I had had. (I have eight good kids, the last of
whom just went to the temple. All would have been good if they had
been orphans.) She, however, had signed up for hard
children, for children who had rebellious spirits but who were valuable;
for a hard husband who had a rebellious spirit but who was valuable.
The Lord alluded to events in her life that I hadn't known about, but which
she confirmed afterwards. Twice Heavenly Father had given her the
choice between life and death, whether to come home and be relieved of
her responsibilities, which weren't going very well, or whether to stay
to see if she could work them through. Twice on death's bed she had
sent the messenger away and gone back to that hard task. She
stayed with it.
I repented.
I realized I was in the presence of one of the Lord's great noble spirits,
who had chosen not a safe place behind the lines punching out the ordinances
to the people in the front lines as I was doing, but somebody who chose
to live out in the trenches where the Lord's work was being done,
where there was risk, where you could be hurt, where you could lose,
where you could be destroyed by your love. That's the way she had
chosen to labor. Then the thought, "I am unworthy to lay my
hands on her head; if our sexes were reversed, she should have had her
hands on mine."
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