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.
Becoming like God
LDS Quotes on Becoming like God
“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.”
“That man is greatest and most blessed and joyful whose life most closely approaches the pattern of the Christ. This has nothing to do with earthly wealth, power, or prestige. The only true test of greatness, blessedness, joyfulness is how close a life can come to being like the Master, Jesus Christ. He is the right way, the full truth, and the abundant life.”
| Ensign, December 1988, p. 2
“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.
“That divinity within us needs food from the Fountain from which it emanated….Principles of eternal life, of God and godliness, will alone feed the immortal capacity of man and give true satisfaction.”
| Discourses of Brigham Young, comp. John A. Widtsoe (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954), 165.
“If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; but if we work upon immortal minds, if we imbue them with principles and the just fear of God and Love of our fellowman, we engrave upon those tablets something that will brighten through all eternity.”
“What Christ is, we Christians shall be, if we imitate Christ.”
| “On the Vanity of Idols,” The Treatises of Cyprian 6:15, in vol. 5, Fathers of the Third Century, 469