Spencer W. Kimball Quotes

Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long-suffering and self-mastery.

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable.

Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

To develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. Such people give us real opportunities to practice tolerance. They test our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot. Basically, patience protects us from being discouraged.

The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.

I'm suffering very much, but am I suffering very well? That's the point!

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

When I planted my pain in the field of patience it bore fruit of happiness.

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!

When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.

I've been through so much stuff that I hope even my enemies wouldn't have to go through.

Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.

Patience is a purifying process that refines understanding, deepens happiness, focuses action, and offers hope for peace.

Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop.

As the most generous vine, if it is not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems, and grows at last weak and fruitless; so dote the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions. If it be painful to bleed, it is worse to wither. Let me be pruned, that I may grow, rather than be cut up to burn.

Bear patiently, my heart, for you have suffered heavier things.

It is... very helpful to think of adversity not so much as a threat to our peace of mind but rather as the very means by which patience is attained.

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

There are many trials in life which do not seem to come from unwisdom or folly; they are silver arrows shot from the bow of God, and fixed inextricably in the quivering heart - they are meant to be borne - they were not meant, like snow or water, to melt as soon as they strike; but the moment an ill can be patiently borne it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.

This iron world bungs down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate.