“The words death and happiness are not close companions in mortality, but in the eternal sense they are essential to one another.”
Physical
LDS Quotes on Physical
“Now a good many people in the world do not know what the resurrection is. Do you teach your children and your associates what it means? . . . [The Savior’s] resurrection is plain to the Latter-day Saints who understand the gospel, but there are so many who do not understand what it means. . . . The purpose of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to prepare every man, woman and child for the time when all those who have died will be brought forth from their graves, and when our Heavenly Father will establish his kingdom upon this earth and the righteous will dwell there and Jesus Christ will be our King and our Law-giver.”
| Teachings of Presidents of the Church, George Albert Smith, Ch. 7, “The Immortality of the Soul”
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
“Death is a mere comma, not an exclamation point!”
After the spirit leaves the body, it remains without a tabernacle in the spirit world until the Lord, by his law that he has ordained, brings to pass the resurrection of the dead. When the angel who holds the keys of the resurrection shall sound his trumpet, then the peculiar fundamental principles that organized our bodies here, if we do honor to them, though they be deposited in the depths of the sea, and though one particle is in the north, another in the south, another in the east, and another in the west, will be brought together again in the twinkling of an eye, and our spirits will take possession of them. We shall then be prepared to dwell with the Father and the Son, and we never can be prepared to dwell with them until then. Spirits, when they leave their bodies, do not dwell with the Father and the Son, but live in the Spirit world, where there are places prepared for them. Those who do honor to their tabernacles, and love and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, must put off this mortality, or they cannot put on immortality. This body must be changed, else it cannot be prepared to dwell in the glory of the Father.
| Journal of Discourses, 8:28
As Christ lived after death so shall all men live, each taking his place in the next world for which he has best fitted himself. The message of the resurrection, therefore, is the most comforting, the most glorious ever given to man, for when death takes a loved one from us, our sorrowing hearts are assuaged by the hope and the divine assurance expressed in the words: “He is not here: he is risen.” Because our Redeemer lives, so shall we. I bear you witness that he does live. I know it, as I hope you know that divine truth. May all mankind some day have that faith.
| Gospel Ideals, p. 48
“The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.”
“If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, … it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fœtus in the womb before it has come to light.”
| Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, trans. Charles William Bingham, 22 vols. (1979), 3:42.
“Without the Resurrection, the gospel of Jesus Christ becomes a litany of wise sayings and seemingly unexplainable miracles – but sayings and miracles with no ultimate triumph. No, the ultimate triumph is in the ultimate miracle: for the first time in the history of mankind, one who was dead raised himself into living immortality. He was the Son of God, the Son of our immortal Father in Heaven, and his triumph over physical and spiritual death is the good news every Christian tongue should speak.”
| Conference Report, April 1986