Quote of the Day

Sometimes we may ask God for success, and He gives us physical and mental stamina. We might plead for prosperity, and we receive enlarged perspective and increased patience, or we petition for growth and are blessed with the gift of grace. He may bestow upon us conviction and confidence as we strive to achieve worthy goals. And when we plead for relief from physical, mental, and spiritual difficulties, He may increase our resolve and resilience.

David A. Bednar

Read the full text here.

Quote of the Day

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Carl Sandburg

On my birthday =)

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

Carl Sandburg

Quote of the Day

You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself.

Galileo

On my wedding anniversary

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

Carl Sandburg

Quote of the Day

Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right.

Ezra Taft Benson

10 Rules for Behavior (Thomas Jefferson)

1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself
3. Never spend your money before you have it
4. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will not be dear to you
5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold
6. We never repent of having eaten too little
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly
8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened
9. Take things always by the smooth handle
10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred

source here.

Quote of the Day

Conversion means to overcome the tendencies to criticize and to strive continually to improve inward weaknesses and not merely outward appearances.

Harold B. Lee

Quote of the Day

No lasting great personal heights are ever reached by those who step on others to try to push themselves upward.

Marvin J. Ashton

Quote of the Day

It is not the critic who counts; not the one who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of great deeds might have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause who if he wins knows the triumph of great achievement; and who if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

The most important part of planning should be done on your knees.

Ezra Taft Benson

Quote of the Day

God didn't say that a woman was to be taken from a bone in the man's head that she should rule over him, nor from a bone in his foot that she should be trampled under his feet, but from the bone in his side, to be his companion, his equal, and his helpmeet in all their lives together.

George Albert Smith

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

I'm in the midst of reading this book and I want to mark several passages so that I can remember them. Hopefully some of you will like them as much as I do.


The following passages highlight Frankl's conclusions on finding meaning in life:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. (page 75)

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only his creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. (page 76)

I once read a letter written by a young invalid, in which he told a friend that he had just found he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now—he wrote—fate was offering him a similar chance. (page 77) 

Details of a particular man's inner greatness may ... come to [your] mind*, like the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it: but to me it seems like a poem.

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.'" 

 *One that comes to my mind is my dear friend Kate who faced long months of pain with dignity and faith until her eventual death.

Quote of the Day

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.


Peter Ustinov

Quote of the Day

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
Carl Sandburg

On my last day of full-time employment

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Carl Sandburg

Quote of the Day

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

Carl Sandburg

Quote of the Day

"Just pray for a tough hide and a tender heart."
Ruth Graham

Quote of the Day

"I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."
Abraham Lincoln

Quote of the Day

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”
― Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: In His Own Words