“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
Is good conscience important? It is a prize beyond expression! And conscience is more than a local standard or the accumulation of the mores and traditions of a community or a society or a generation. Whatever else it is, it is the voice of God speaking to us, inspiring moral obligation. Washington called it “that little spark of celestial fire.” It is true that we can desensitize our conscience, as it were. In the Book of Mormon we read of a group to whom God had spoken “in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling” (1 Ne. 17:45). It is also said that there are those who have become “dead as to things pertaining unto righteousness” (Alma 5:42). As we can desensitize a conscience, so to speak, so we can prepare ourselves better to hear the voice of the Lord by stripping off what the poet called the layers of “muddy vesture and decay,” by ceasing to sin and learning to obey. There is the privilege of learning true values and living to them.
| “Thank God It Can Be Done in My Time”
“I mentioned earlier that the greatest hymns and anthems have not been composed, nor have the greatest illustrations been set down, nor the poems written, nor the paintings finished. When they are produced, who will produce them? Will it be the most talented and the most highly trained among us? I rather think it will not. They will be produced by those who are the most inspired among us. Inspiration can come to those whose talents are barely adequate, and their contribution will be felt for generations; and the Church and kingdom of God will move forward just a little more easily because they have been here.”
| “The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord,” That All May Be Edified (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1982), 285.