“[God] was made flesh in order that we might be enabled to be made gods.”
| See Athanasius, Orationes Contra Arianus (Four Discourses Against the Arians)
Becoming like God
LDS Quotes on Becoming like God
“Another great advantage of joy, contrasted with pleasure, is that joy overrides routine, which, otherwise, could make us bored. We don’t know, for instance, how many times Heavenly Father has been through the plan of salvation before with other of His children elsewhere before our particular sequence on this planet. God even hints at the repetitiveness of His redemption when He says, “[My] course is one eternal round” (see 1 Nephi 10:19; Alma 7:20; D&C 3:2). Yet God is never bored by what might seem mere routine. Why? Because of His perfect love for His children! What He calls “my work and my glory” brings abundant and pure joy! (see Moses 1:39).”
| “Brim with Joy” (Alma 26:11), BYU Devotional, January 23, 1996
“The true God [referring to the Father], then, is ‘The God,’ and those who are formed after Him are gods, images, as it were, of Him the prototype.”
| Origen, Commentary on John 2:2, in The Gospel of Peter, the Diatessaron of Tatian, vol. 9 of Ante-Nicene Fathers
God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.
“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.”
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which . . . you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . There are no ordinary people.”
| “Love Thy Neighbor,” in The Joyful Christian (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 197.
“The purpose of the gospel is to make bad men good and good men better.”
“Have ye received his image in your countenances?” “Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into . . . a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares His power, joy, knowledge and eternity.”
| Mere Christianity
“The thirst for the infinite proves infinity.”
| “Victor Hugo on Immortality,” Fifty Years, 324–25
“If within the short space of mortal life there are men who rise up out of infancy and become masters of the elements of fire and water and earth and air, so that they well-nigh rule them as Gods, what may it not be possible for them to do in a few hundreds or thousands of millions of years?”
| The Mormon Doctrine of Deity, 35.