"[God] extends us personal invitations to strengthen and deepen our trust in Him. Each time we accept and act on an invitation, our trust in God grows. If we ignore or decline an invitation, our progress stops until we're ready to act on a new invitation."
-Paul B. Pieper, Trust in the Lord, Liahona Nov. 2023
"We consider that God has created man with a mind capable of instruction, and a faculty which may be enlarged in proportion to the heed and diligence given to the light communicated from heaven to the intellect; and that the nearer man approaches perfection, the clearer are his views, and the greater his enjoyments, till he has overcome the evils of his life and lost every desire for sin; and like the ancients, arrives at that point of faith where he is wrapped in the power and glory of his Maker and is caught up to dwell with Him. But we consider that this is a station to which no man ever arrived in a moment: he must have been instructed in the government and laws of that kingdom by proper degrees, until his mind is capable in some measure of comprehending6 the propriety, justice, equality, and consistency of the same."
-Joseph Smith, Jr., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith
"No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire."
-George MacDonald
“Son,' he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”
"If we ask ourselves what we desire the most in life, the most common answers would be: love, happiness, peace, and power. What we want to experience is what we need to create in response to every scene. For only when we create it, can we experience it and radiate it into the world."
-BK Shivani, The Power of One Thought
“Just as a man does not really desire food until he is hungry, so he does not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ. No one adequately and properly knows why he needs Christ until he understands and accepts the doctrine of the Fall and its effect upon all mankind. And no other book in the world explains this vital doctrine nearly as well as the Book of Mormon.”
-Ezra T. Benson,
Ensign, May 1987
A Zen master and his students were walking in the forest and they came across a large boulder.
On seeing that, the master asked his students, "Is this boulder heavy?"
"Yes," they replied, "it is very heavy."
The Zen master asked, "Are you sure?"
The students looked at it again and said of course it's very heavy.
And with that, the master replied, "Only if you pick it up."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boulder-heavy-anjana-vinod-kumar/
