LDS Quotes on Death
“Remaining true to our Christian principles is the only way divine influence can help us. The Spirit has a near impossible task to get through to a heart that is filled with hate or anger or vengeance or self-pity.”
“My children and I were at her bedside as she slipped peacefully into eternity. As I held her hand and saw mortal life drain from her fingers, I confess I was overcome. Before I married her, she had been the girl of my dreams, to use the words of a song then popular. She was my dear companion for more than two-thirds of a century, my equal before the Lord, really my superior. And now in my old age, she has again become the girl of my dreams.”
Of all the tests we face, none hurts more than the death of a loved one. Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ all are delivered from death, and all will rise in the Resurrection. And by the Atonement of Jesus Christ, all may gain peace in this life washed clean from the sorrows of sin and have hope of a glorious resurrection with the just…At this Easter season we give our sure witness that Jesus is the Christ, the Redeemer of all mankind. Because of His atoning sacrifice, He stands as our Advocate and Savior. Though He was crucified, He rose triumphant from the tomb to our everlasting blessing and benefit.
| First Presidency Easter Message [Thomas S. Monson, Henry B. Eyring, Dieter F. Uchtdorf], LDS Church News, March 31, 2013
“Death is a kind of graduation day for life. It is our only means of entrance to our eternal lives.”
Faith is the power by which God speaks and worlds, solar systems, and universes come into being. So when we speak of faith we speak of tremendous power, even the power that can save a man from temporal and spiritual death.
| An Exploration of the Process of Faith as Taught in the Book of Mormon,” Church Education System Manual, p. 17
Jesus is the first begotten from the dead, as you will understand. Neither Enoch, Elijah, Moses, nor any other man that ever lived on earth, no matter how strictly he lived, ever obtained a resurrection until after Jesus Christ’s body was called from the tomb by the angel. He was the first begotten from the dead. He is the Master of the resurrection.
| Discourses of Brigham Young, 374
Mark well those who speak evil of the Lord’s anointed, for they speak from impure hearts. Only the “pure in heart” see the “God” or the divine in man and accept our leaders and accept them as prophets of the Living God. . . .
I want to bear you my testimony that the experience I have had has taught me that those who criticize the leaders of this Church are showing signs of a spiritual sickness which, unless curbed, will bring about eventually spiritual death. I want to bear my testimony as well that those who in public seek by their criticism to belittle our leaders or bring them into disrepute, will bring upon themselves more hurt than upon those whom they seek thus to malign. I have watched over the years, and I have read of the history of many of those who fell away from this Church, and I want to bear testimony that no apostate who ever left this Church ever prospered as an influence in his community thereafter.
| Conference Report, October 1947, p. 67
“We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about ‘pie in the sky’, and of being told that we are trying to ‘escape’ from the duty of making a happy world here and now into the dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is a ‘pie in the sky’ or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric.”
That the spirit of man passes triumphantly through the portals of death into everlasting life is one of the glorious messages given by Christ, our Redeemer. To him this earthly career is but a day and its closing but the setting of life’s sun. Death, but a sleep, is followed by a glorious awakening in the morning of an eternal realm. . . . If everyone . . . knew that the crucified Christ actually rose on the third day – that after having greeted others and mingled with others in the spirit world, his spirit did again reanimate his pierced body, and after sojourning among men for the space of forty days, he ascended a glorified soul to his Father – what benign peace would come to souls now troubled with doubt and uncertainty!
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stands with Peter, with Paul, with James, and with all the other early apostles who accepted the resurrection not only as being literally true, but as the consummation of Christ’s divine mission on earth.
| Teachings of Presidents of the Church: David O. McKay, pp. 65-66
What a dark valley and a shadow it is that we call death! To pass from this state of existence as far as the mortal body is concerned, into a state of inanition [emptiness], how strange it is! How dark this valley is! How mysterious is this road, and we have got to travel it alone. I would like to say to you, my friends and brethren, if we could see things as they are, and as we shall see and understand them, this dark shadow and valley is so trifling that we shall turn round and look about upon it and think, when we have crossed it, why this is the greatest advantage of my whole existence, for I have passed from a state of sorrow, grief, mourning, woe, misery, pain, anguish and disappointment into a state of existence, where I can enjoy life to the fullest extent as far as that can be done without a body.
| (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young (1997), 273) — “Death and Life, Pioneer Perspectives on the Resurrection,” Ensign, April 2013, p. 52