Neal A. Maxwell was born in Salt Lake City, Utah
to Clarence Maxwell and his wife Emma Ash. Clarence had moved to Salt Lake City from Montana about four years earlier and had joined the LDS Church not long after moving there.
Neal Maxwell attended Granite High School.
During World War II
, Maxwell served as an infantryman in the United States Army, where he saw action on Okinawa
.
After the war, Maxwell served as a missionary
of the LDS Church for two years in Canada
.
While pursuing his undergraduate education at the University of Utah before leaving on his mission Maxwell met Colleen Hinckley.
I have on my office wall a wise and useful reminder by Anne Morrow Lindbergh concerning one of the realities of life. She wrote, "My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds." That's good counsel for us all, not as an excuse to forgo duty, but as a sage point about pace and the need for quality in relationships. 
The good life is the best preparation for bad times.
A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation."