Gordon B. Hinckley Quotes

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

I always admired virtue - but I could never imitate it.

A big part of honesty is self-discipline, personal resolve, and taking pride in who you are as a person and what each action means to your character.

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

Live up to your convictions. You walk in grace or you walk in fear. You can't have it both ways.

I want to do things right. I really, really do.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

The test of any man lies in action.

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Looking back, I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in.

I urge you to hold fast to your standards. I plead with you not to waver.

The man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.

You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it.

I want to be able to look back and say that I stood where I was supposed to stand. I fought where I was supposed to fight, in the ring and out of the ring.

Don't sell out your virtue and your value for something you think you want. Judas got the money, but he threw it all away and hung himself because he was so unhappy with himself.

When no one is watching, live as if someone is.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

We may make mistakes-but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.

Every man of character will have that character questioned. Every man of honor and courage will be faced with unjust criticism, but never forget that unjust criticism has no impact whatsoever upon the truth. And the only sure way to avoid criticism is to do nothing and be nothing.

From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Virtue is more to man than either water or fire. I have seen men die from treading on water and fire, but I have never seen a man die from treading the course of virtue.

We follow the codes not because they bring gain, but because we loathe the people we would otherwise become.

Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything which needs walls and curtains.