“Rationalizing is the bringing of ideals down to the level of one’s conduct. Repentance is the bringing of one’s conduct up to the level of his ideals.”
| The Miracle of Forgiveness
Sin
LDS Quotes About Sin
“It is my testimony that many of the deepest regrets of tomorrow can be prevented by following the Savior today. If we have sinned or made mistakes—if we have made choices that we now regret—there is the precious gift of Christ’s Atonement, through which we can be forgiven. We cannot go back in time and change the past, but we can repent.”
“The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.”
| The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book
“It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses – say motherly love or patriotism – are good, and others, like sex or fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which fighting instinct or sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining motherly love or patriotism.”
Man unquestionably has impressive powers … But after all our obedience and good works, we cannot be saved from the effects of our sins without the grace extended by the atonement of Jesus Christ … Man cannot earn his own salvation.
“Never must we allow supposed mercy to the unrepentant sinner to rob the justice by which the true repentance from sinful practices is predicated.”
| Strengthening the Home, 1973, p. 5.
“In the scriptures there is no such thing as righteous pride. It is always considered as a sin. We are not speaking of a wholesome view of self-worth, which is best established by a close relationship with God. But we are speaking of pride as the universal sin. . . . Essentially, pride is a “my will” rather than “thy will” approach to life. The opposite of pride is humbleness, meekness, submissiveness (see Alma 13:28), or teachableness. . . .Pride is characterized by “What do I want out of life?” rather than by “What would God have me do with my life?” It is self-will as opposed to God’s will. It is the fear of man over the fear of God.”
| in Conference Report, April 1986, pp. 5-6; or “Cleansing the Inner Vessel,” Ensign, May 1986, pp. 6-7
Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin as to take them by the hand and watch over them with tenderness. When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what pow’r it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.
| Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book, Page 62
“God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The sins that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. These things can be shared and absorbed, but they cannot be simply wished or waved away. They must be suffered.”
| Believing Christ: The Parable of the Bicycle and Other Good News
“The vocabulary of sin and guilt and damnation has too often overwhelmed the restored gospel’s message of absolute love and powerfully grounded hopefulness. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, summarizing the almost universal misapprehension of overanxious Saints among us, we must learn to ‘distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second. When conscience calls to us from the next ridge,’ he wrote, her purpose is to beckon not to scold.
“Rather than continuing to frame our lives in terms of deficiency and inadequacy, we would benefit from the perspective of Irenaeus, who emphasized the forward-looking process in which we should be engaged: becoming ‘perfected after the image and likeness of God.'”