Harold B. Lee

[Harold B. Lee offered to take his daughter's two sons to sit with him at a church dance festival.  He said of this experience,] "I didn’t know what I was getting into. … As that spectacle began, I didn’t know there was so much difference between a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. The seven-year-old was entranced by that spectacle down on the football field. But that five-year-old, his attention span was pretty short. He’d squirm and then he’d want to go and get a hot dog and he’d want to go get a drink and he’d want to go to the toilet, and he was just on the move all the time. And here I was sitting in the front with the General Authorities, and they were smiling as they saw this little show going on and as I tried to pull my grandson here and there, trying to make him behave. Finally, that little five-year-old turned on me and with his little doubled-up fist he smacked me to the side of the face and he said, “Grandfather, don’t shove me!” And you know, that hurt. In that twilight, I thought I could see my brethren chuckling a bit as they saw this going on, and my first impulse was to take him and give him a good spanking; that’s what he deserved. But, I’d seen his little mother do something. I’d seen her when he was having a temper tantrum and she had a saying, “You have to love your children when they’re the least lovable.” And so I thought I’d try that out. I had failed in the other process.
So I took him in my arms and I said to him, “My boy, Grandfather loves you. I so much want you to grow up to be a fine big boy. I just want you to know that I love you, my boy.” His little angry body began to [relax], and he threw his arms around my neck and he kissed my cheek, and he loved me. I had conquered him by love. And incidentally, he had conquered me by love.

Address to Sunday School general conference, 5 Oct. 1973, Historical Department Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7–8.), as reprinted in the Teachings of Harold B. Lee manual (2000), Ch.14, p. 296

Orson F. Whitney

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.

Orson F. Whitney, as quoted from “Chapter 2: Tragedy or Destiny?,” Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball, (2006),11–21"