Quotes By LDS Prophet Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith was the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, he is considered by members of the Church as a prophet, seer, and revelator. Joseph translated the Book of Mormon, another testament of Jesus Christ and a record of ancient American peoples as was revealed to him by God.
Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin as to take them by the hand and watch over them with tenderness. When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what pow’r it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.
| Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book, Page 62
“God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. . . . It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converse with another, and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did.”
| Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith
“Being born again, comes by the Spirit of God through ordinances.”
| Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith
“What have we to console us in relation to the dead? We have reason to have the greatest hope and consolation for our dead of any people on the earth.”
The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done.
“There is a difference between the Holy Ghost and the gift of the Holy Ghost. Cornelius received the Holy Ghost before he was baptized, which was the convincing power of God unto him of the truth of the Gospel, but he could not receive the gift of the Holy Ghost until after he was baptized. Had he not [been baptized], the Holy Ghost which convinced him of the truth of God, would have left him.”
| History of the Church, 4:555
“We are looked upon by God as though we were in eternity. God dwells in eternity, and does not view things as we do.”
| Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 356.
“When a man works by faith he works by mental exertion instead of physical force. It is by words, instead of exerting his physical powers, with which every being works when he works by faith. God said, ‘Let there be light: and there was light.’ . . . And the Savior says: “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, say tot his mountain, ‘Remove,’ and it will remove; or say to that sycamine tree, ‘Be ye plucked up, and planted in the midst of the sea,’ and it shall obey you. Faith, then works by words; and with these its mightiest works have been, and will be, performed.
| Lectures on Faith, 72-73 — The Pearl of Great Price Student Manual, p. 7
“At the first organization in heaven we were all present and saw the Savior chosen and appointed, and the plan of salvation made and we sanctioned it.”
| The Words of Joseph Smith
In pitching my tent we found three prairie rattlesnakes, which the brethren were about to kill, but I said, ‘Let them alone—don’t hurt them! How will the serpent ever lose its venom, while the servants of God possess the same disposition, and continue to make war upon it? Men must become harmless before the brute creation, and when men lose their vicious dispositions and cease to destroy the animal race, the lion and the lamb can dwell together, and the sucking child can play with the serpent in safety.’”
| Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 71