Top 180 Neal A. Maxwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The scriptures offer us so many doctrinal diamonds. And when the light of the Spirit plays upon their several facets, they sparkle with celestial sense and illuminate the path we are to follow.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

52. “You must not mistake passing local cloud cover, for general darkness.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

53. “When we don’t like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak about killing a baby within the womb, but about “termination of potential life.” Words are often multiplied to try to cover dark deeds.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

54. “How could there be refining fires without our enduring some heat?”

— Neal A. Maxwell

55. “The more quickly we loosen our grip on the things of the world the more firmly we can take hold of the things of eternity.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

56. “Blessed is he who will not be offended.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

57. “The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

58. “Those who do too much for their children will soon find they can do nothing with their children. So many children have been so much done for they are almost done in.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

59. “A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

60. “Oh, how great the plan of our God!”

— Neal A. Maxwell

61. “Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

62. “Any assessment of where we stand in relationship to Him tells us that we do not stand at all. We kneel.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

63. “At the center of our agency is our freedom to form a healthy attitude toward whatever circumstances we are placed in!”

— Neal A. Maxwell

64. “Love, patience, and meekness can be just as contagious as rudeness and crudeness.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

65. “Regarding trials, including of our faith and patience, there are no exemptions-only variations.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

66. “How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?”

— Neal A. Maxwell

67. “God’s grace will cover us like a cloak-enough to provide for survival but too thin to keep out all the cold.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

68. “God’s anger is kindled not because we have harmed him but because we have harmed ourselves.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

69. “What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

70. “The harrowing of the soul can be like the harrowing of the soil; to increase the yield, things are turned upside down.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

71. “In contrast to the path of selfishness, there is no room for road rage on the straight and narrow way.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

72. “Selfishness is much more than an ordinary problem because it activates all the cardinal sins! It is the detonator in the breaking of the Ten Commandments.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

73. “Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

74. “Truly we work and live on a streetful of splendid people, whom we are to love and serve even if they are uninterested in us!”

— Neal A. Maxwell

75. “The day will come, brothers and sisters, when we will have other books of scripture which will emerge to accompany the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Presently you and I carry our scriptures around in a “quad”; the day will come when you’ll need a little red wagon.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

76. “Though we live in a failing world, we have not been sent here to fail.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

77. “When great individuals move so marvelously along the straight and narrow path, it is unseemly of us to call attention to the fact that one of their shoelaces is untied as they make the journey.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

78. “If we are serious about our discipleship, Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are most difficult for us to do.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

79. “God’s extraordinary work is most often done by ordinary people in the seeming obscurity of a home and family.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

80. “The enlarging of the soul requires not only some remodeling, but some excavating.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

81. “Even if work were not an economic necessity, it is a spiritual necessity.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

82. “In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

83. “Crowds cannot make right what God has declared to be wrong.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

84. “Sometimes we are so busy being the hammer or the anvil, that we forget who really needs the shaping.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

85. “You rock a sobbing child without wondering if today’s world is passing you by, because you know you hold tomorrow tightly in your arms.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

86. “How myopic it is to view His ministry as all crucifixion and no resurrection!”

— Neal A. Maxwell

87. “Real hope is much more than wishful musing. It stiffens, not slackens, the spiritual spine.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

88. “Meekness, the subtraction of self, reduces the multiplication of words.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

89. “Satan delights to have us put ourselves down. Self-contempt is of Satan. There is no such thing in heaven.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

90. “Pure religion is having the courage to do what is right and let the consequence follow.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

91. “Joshua didn’t say choose you next year whom you will serve; he spoke of “this day,” while there is still daylight and before the darkness becomes more and more normal.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

92. “It is not the years but the changes that make us grow.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

93. “How good you and I get at repenting will determine how good life is.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

94. “A vague goal is no goal at all. The Ten Commandments wouldn’t be very impressive, for instance, if they weren’t specific, but simply were couched in a phraseology such as ’thou shalt not be a bad person.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

95. “I know the celestial criteria measure service, not status; the use of our talents, not the relative size of our talent inventories. I know that Church membership is not passive security but continuing opportunity.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

96. “A patient willingness to defer dividends is a hallmark of individual maturity.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

97. “As parenting declines, the need for policing increases. There will always be a shortage of police if there is a shortage of effective parents! Likewise, there will not be enough prisons if there are not enough good homes.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

98. “I testify that He is utterly incomparable in what He is, what He knows, what He has accomplished and what He has experienced. Yet, movingly, He calls us His Friends.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

99. “Repentance is a rescuing, not a dour, doctrine.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

100. “We may never become accustomed to untrue and unjust criticism of us but we ought not to be immobilized by it.”

— Neal A. Maxwell