Do not make small goals because they do not have the magic to stir men's souls.
Spencer W. KimballRead
Your life is your own, to develop or to destroy. You can blame others little and yourself almost totally if that life is not a productive, worthy, full, and abundant one.
Interpretation
You have the power to shape your life positively or negatively, and ultimately, you are responsible for it.
This quote by Spencer W. Kimball emphasizes personal responsibility in shaping one's life. It suggests that individuals hold the primary authority over their lives, and while external factors may influence them, the choices they make determine whether their life is productive and fulfilling. Blaming others is trivial compared to the significant role self-accountability plays in personal development.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal development.
Do not make small goals because they do not have the magic to stir men's souls.
What could you do better for your children and your children's children than to record the story of your life, your triumphs over adversity, your recovery after a fall, your progress when all seemed black, your rejoicing when you had finally achieved? Some of what you write may be humdrum dates and places, but there will also be rich passages that will be quoted by your posterity.
Failure to plan brings barrenness and sterility. Fate brushes man with its wings, but we make our own fate largely.
A dozen times a day we come to a fork in the road and must decide which way we will go. It is important to get our ultimate objectives clearly in mind so that we do not become distracted at each fork in the road by the irrelevant questions: Which is the easier or more pleasant way? Or, Which way are others going?
The day obedience becomes a quest and not an irritation is the day you gain power.
Only when you lift a burden, God will lift your burden. Divine paradox this! The man who staggers and falls because his burden is too great can lighten that burden by taking on the weight of another's burden. You get by giving, but your part of giving must be given first.
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
Being a teenager and figuring out who you are is hard enough without someone attacking you.
To live without loving is not really to live.
...as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.
My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.
If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude get stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
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