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Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas S. Monson

"Choose your friends with caution; plan your future with purpose, and frame your life with faith"

About this Quote

A three-part imperative like this is designed to feel like a life map you can carry in your pocket: social circle, long-range trajectory, inner architecture. Monson, speaking as a Latter-day Saint church leader, isn’t offering self-help so much as issuing pastoral triage. Start with the most contagious force in young adulthood: friends. “Choose your friends with caution” carries the quiet assumption that agency is real but fragile, and that belonging can either fortify or corrode your moral compass. It’s less about snobbery than about environmental design: you become what your relationships repeatedly reward.

Then the line swivels from peer pressure to intentionality: “plan your future with purpose.” The subtext is a rebuttal to drift. In Monson’s religious context, “purpose” is never merely careerist; it implies covenant, service, family responsibility, and a life that points outward. The phrasing folds modern productivity language into a spiritual ethic, meeting ambition where it lives while trying to redirect it toward meaning.

The closer, “frame your life with faith,” is the rhetorical masterstroke. “Frame” suggests structure without suffocation: faith as the boundary that gives the picture coherence, not a paint-by-numbers kit that replaces it. It’s also a gentle power move. If faith provides the frame, then every other choice - friends, plans, identity - gets interpreted inside a sacred perimeter. The sentence works because it doesn’t argue; it organizes. It offers a calm, parentally confident order of operations for living, one that turns everyday decisions into acts of discipleship.

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Choose your friends with caution plan your future with purpose, and frame your life with faith
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Thomas S. Monson (August 21, 1927 - January 2, 2018) was a Clergyman from USA.

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