Russell M. Nelson Quotes

My mother taught me to always be strong and always work hard. She's been working hard her whole life for me and my brother. I'm a lot like her in that I work hard for what I want. She taught me that.

My daughter Alexandra once told me, "Mother, you're a pioneer. Now, hardly anybody cooks, but you were one of the first to stop." After 20 years of cooking, I started to appreciate the value of other people's work. So I would, say, go get a duck in Chinatown. I always had the salad and set the table, but I didn't have to clean the pots.

Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.

If you take care of the woman in the family, the whole family prospers. But when the mother falters, the family falls apart.

When I look at him, I don't see the cowardly young man who sold me out to Jeanine Matthews, and i don't hear the excuses he gave afterward. When I look at him, I see the boy who held my hand in the hospital when our mother broke her wrist and told me it would be all right. I see the brother who told me to make my own choices, the night before the Choosing Ceremony. I think of all the remarkable things he is--smart and enthusiastic and observant, quiet and earnest and kind.

The person who has the most influence on me is my mother. Think of life as a flight where we fly higher and higher. If I were a bird that needs feathers to fly higher, I would regard my mother as my strongest feather.

I really learned it all from mothers.

She [my mother] struggled, abusing alcohol for quite some time, and so we just kind of drifted apart. I went to college. But I dedicate the book to her because she is the true champion of the family. She kept our family together. She provided us with a roof over our head. She always worked.

Love, acceptance, friends, two kids that I love. I have to take care of myself for them. I've also been a vegetarian for two years.

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.

My mother and father took me in and provided everything for me - the love, nurturing, basic necessities - to give me the space to grow wings, so that when I went out into the world, I could fly.

Love is a command to rise to one's highest potential, the best and noblest vision of ourselves. Love is a reward, the greatest we can earn, granted to us for the moral qualities we have achieved in our lives.

My mother really was an extraordinary, inspirational, tough, cool, sexy, funny woman and that's the kind of woman I've always surrounded myself with. It's my friends, particularly my wife, who is not only smarter than and stronger than I am but, occasionally taller too. I think it all goes back to my mother. My father and my stepfather prized whit and resolve in the women they were with above all things. And they were among the rare men who understood that recognising somebody else's power does not diminish your own.

My mother became a believer, and then I became a believer. But when I was 43 years old, I began to think for myself, somehow, by fluke and by grace. And I thought, "Oh, my. I was so mistaken." The world isn't what I believed it to be. I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick," I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.

I didn't know that my sister was really my mother until I was thirty-seven years old. But life has taught me that there have been a lot of things that I didn't know.

I'm just a normal mother with the same struggles as any other mother who's trying to do everything at once and trying to be a wife and maintain a relationship. There's absolutely nothing perfect about my life, but I just try hard.

How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home-and how apparent when neglected!

I had the great advantage of a mother who used to tell me the most beautiful years of a woman's life are ages 35 to 45.

Holy Mother Church teaches us to end the year and also our days with an examination of conscience...to be grateful and to ask for forgiveness.

The beauty of getting older is the surprise of what else you can do to make the world a better place with the wisdom that you've accrued over those years.

So mothers everywhere take heart. The indoctrination you administer now may have unanticipated positive effects years later.

In the older times it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition. But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of their individual powers.

My mother really was the strength in our family. She would sort of keep us in line and I admired her very much .

I have no doubt that over the years my children will find plenty of things about me to criticize. But something tells me that twenty years from now not one of them will sit on some therapist's couch complaining because their mother didn't spend enough time vacuuming up glitter.