Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas S. Monson

Monson’s line doesn’t flirt with doubt; it tries to evict it. The verb “forbid” lands with ecclesiastical authority, but it’s also intimate self-command, the kind you use when you feel your mental perimeter getting breached. “Agnostic, doubting thoughts” are treated like intruders rather than honest questions, which is the rhetorical tell: the danger isn’t ignorance, it’s erosion. He’s not arguing doubt down with evidence. He’s asserting jurisdiction.

The metaphor does most of the work. Faith becomes a “house,” not a lightning bolt or a feeling. A house is built, maintained, inhabited. It has walls, rooms, a roof that can leak. That framing quietly admits vulnerability: houses can be vandalized, abandoned, foreclosed on. To “destroy” a house is to collapse a whole lived structure of meaning - community, ritual, identity - not merely to change one’s mind. Monson is defending continuity, not just belief.

Context matters. As a Latter-day Saint leader speaking to members in a late-20th-century environment of expanding secularism, higher education, and information access, he’s addressing the modern condition where doubt isn’t a singular crisis but a steady ambient pressure. The line functions like a protective liturgy: repeatable, decisive, emotionally bracing. Subtext: you may not control what questions appear, but you can deny them executive power. It’s less a ban on thinking than a bid to keep faith from being forced into a courtroom when Monson wants it to remain a home.