When firmly planted, your testimony of the gospel, of the Savior, and of our Heavenly Father will influence all that you do throughout your life. It will help to determine how you spend your time and with whom you choose to associate. It will affect the way you treat your family, how you interact with others. It will bring love, peace, and joy into your life.
God will never plant the seed of his life upon the soil of a hard, unbroken spirit. He will only plant that seed where the conviction of his spirit has brought brokenness, where the soil has been watered with the tears of repentance as well as the tears of joy.
To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts, to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom - one brief hour of madness and joy.
Elinor could sit still no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease.
My grandfather was a provider. Work, any kind of work, was the joy of his life. So I grew up having a certain relationship to work. It was something that I always wanted.
To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.
And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They have a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being.
The charitable say in effect, 'I seem to have more than I need and you seem to have less than you need. I would like to share my excess with you.' Fine, if my excess is tangible, money or goods, and fine if not, for I learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings.
Those who show pity and are always ready to help during times of trouble are seldom the same ones who rejoice in our joy: when others are happy they have nothing to do, they become superfluous and lose their feeling of superiority, and so they easily show their displeasure.