"I am like a pencil in [God's] hand.  That is all.  He does the thinking.  He does the writing.  The pencil has nothing to do with it.  The pencil has only to be allowed to be used."

-Mother Teresa

"You either get bitter or you get better. It's that simple.  You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down.  The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you."

-Josh Shipp

"My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

-Abraham Lincoln

"Life - it is like a voyage to some known point . . . I stand at the rudder, I have chosen my path . . . but God rules the storm and the sea.  He may direct it otherwise; and then, happen what may, it will be the best for me."

-Hans Christian Andersen
The True Story of my Life

“There [will] come a time when God will fill what He [has] emptied.”

         

   -Brother Benito, Garlic for Pegasus:  The Life of Brother Benito do Goes of the Society of Jesus, Schoenberg

"Imagine yourself as a living house.  God comes in to rebuild that house.  At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing.  He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.  But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense.  What on earth is He up to?  The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.  You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.  He intends to come and live in it Himself."

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord, and then do it."

Ezra Taft Benson
The Great Commandment - Love the Lord, Ensign, May 1988, 4

"I am going to preach a hard doctrine to you now.  The submission of one's will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God's altar.  It is a hard doctrine, but it is true.  The many other things we give to God, however nice that may be of us, are actually things He has already given us, and He has loaned them to us.  But when we begin to submit ourselves by letting our will be swallowed up in God's will, then we are really giving something to Him.  And that hard doctrine lies at the center of discipleship.  There is a part of us that is ultimately sovereign, the mind and heart, where we really do decide which way to go and what to do.  And when we submit to His will, then we've really given Him the one final thing He asks of us.  And the other things are not very, very important.  It is the only possession we have that we can give, and there is no lessening of our agency as a result.  Instead, what we see is a flowering of our talents and more and more surges of joy.  Submission to Him is the only form of submission that is completely safe."

Neal A. Maxwell
Ensign, August 2000 "Insights from My Life"