“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
Character
LDS Quotes on Character
“The great Mediator asks for our repentance not because we must ‘repay’ him in exchange for his paying our debt to justice, but because repentance initiates a developmental process that, with the Savior’s help, leads us along the path to a saintly character”
| The Broken Heart [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989], 149;
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
“Righteous character is more valuable than any material object you own, any knowledge you have gained through study, or any goals you have attained, no matter how well lauded by mankind. In the next life your righteous character will be evaluated to assess how well you used the privilege of mortality.”
“The tongue is the mirror of the soul. Spoken words reveal the intents, desires, and feelings of the heart. We shall give an account before the judgment bar for every spoken word, and shall be condemned for our idle, intemperate, profane, and false words. Implicit in this principle of judgment is the fact that we can control what we say. And what better test can there be of a godly self-control than the ability to tame the tongue!”
| Doctrinal New Testament Commentary, Vol. 3: Colossians-Revelation (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 262.
“Be grateful, be smart, be clean, be true, be humble, be prayerful.”
| Way To Be!: 9 Rules For Living The Good Life
“All of man’s miseries come from his incapacity to sit alone in an empty, quiet room.”
There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.
| A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“We may be quite sure that Christ-centeredness and Christ-likeness will never be attained by our own unaided efforts. How can self drive out self? We could as well expect Satan to drive out Satan. We’re not interested in skin-deep holiness and a merely external resemblance to Jesus Christ. We’re not satisfied by a superficial modification of behavior patterns in conformity to some Christian subculture which expects this, commands that, and prohibits the other. No, what we long for is a deep inward change of character resulting from a change of nature and leading to a radical change of conduct. In a word, we want to be like Christ, and that thoroughly, profoundly, entirely. Nothing less than that will do.”
| 1992 CES Symposium at BYU
You cannot be passive in life, or in time the natural man will undermine your efforts to live worthily. You become what you do and what you think about. Lack of character leads one under pressure to satisfy appetite or seek personal gain.”