BYU Speeches
Alphabetical by Speaker

I testify to you that there is another, a greater One, who lived, who walked the dusty roads of Galilee, who atoned for our sins, who was crucified and resurrected, and who lives again.

Great minds conceive great questions—questions that spark imagination, questions that stimulate discovery, and questions that provoke more questions. Ignorance cannot last long when accompanied by investigation and inquiry.

Al registrar los sentimientos que tuvo al salir de la Arboleda y en los días subsiguientes, José dejó registrada esta oración: “Mi alma se llenó de amor, y por muchos días pude regocijarme con gran gozo, y el Señor estaba conmigo, pero no pude encontrar a ninguno que creyera mi visión celestial”.

Recording the feelings he had on leaving the Grove and on the subsequent days, Joseph left on record this sentence: “My soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great joy and the Lord was with me but [I] could find none that would believe the heavenly vision.”

I want to focus not so much on his prophetic character and gifts as on the characteristics observed by those who surrounded him—on Joseph Smith the man.

I have gone through the life of Joseph Smith and singled out instances in that life when these gifts were manifest. It is no surprise that he did, in fact, experience all the spiritual gifts.

In all of this Joseph struggled both to endure and to overcome. That is the tension we all face. What must we simply go through, and what, through our faith and worthiness, can we overcome?

The Kirtland Temple was an unprecedented sacrifice, and it was met with an unprecedented divine outpouring.

There is a difference between speaking, testifying, and teaching, and that setting in which soul is alone with soul. And in this again the Prophet was a master.

The Nauvoo era also was the period of a life-and-death struggle, for there were many who by that time were organized against the Church and who swore they would bring Joseph Smith and his kingdom of blockheads to naught.

Like many of the prophets of ancient times, the prophet of the last dispensation was martyred for the Lord’s cause.

When you are on record and in the presence of others, and are trying to be truthful, and you consult the depths of your own soul, you yourself may learn how profoundly you know.

It is during our Abrahamic tests, our moments of excruciating trial, that we prove to ourselves how strong our conviction really is and receive our rewards.

The heritage of prayer in this church teaches us that, whether or not we settle the question of foreknowledge, there is a point in reaching up to that Person, not a thing, who is himself free and has used his freedom to forbid to himself the use of force.

“On this campus you have engaged texts and teachers. In the temple you can engage and commune with the intimate and ultimate Creator.”

Among the words of the English language the word farewell is the hardest to pronounce, and I, probably, will succeed very poorly at my present attempt.

Amid the ever-changing scenes of development . . . there must go through it all, like a golden thread, one thing constant: the spirit of the latter-day work.

Questions—particularly questions that arise about the gospel—can be especially trying. Questions are inherently born of uncertainty, and we as humans are vehemently opposed to uncertainty. We dislike the feeling of not knowing because we feel vulnerable. Yet this vulnerability can actually be a sacred space.

I have since learned that dwelling obsessively on what we do wrong is one of the greatest sources of interference to maximizing our potential. Self-doubt is dangerous.

The Lord knows you by name. He is so eager to share His infinite love with you. He wants you to feel His love so that you will embrace your life’s plan and cherish the gift that it is.

It is possible to reach your goals if you work hard, keep the right perspective, and use your challenges as opportunities to grow and develop.

Brothers and sisters, you are the light of the world and the future mileposts in the timeline of technology. May we recognize a loving Heavenly Father’s hand in the miracles of the technologies around us and remember that He gave them to us to bless us and our families and to advance His purposes.

It is true that we have to shoulder our burdens and do hard work, but when we look with hope and love to Christ, we will be given compensating blessings that will bind us to Him in powerful ways—even if our challenge remains.

The message of the Atonement is a message of joy. Our Savior knows our suffering. He took upon Himself our suffering that we might have joy.

Each of us has the capacity to accomplish much good in this life, but we must always return credit and appreciation to the source of all that is good and truthful.

Remember that there is one thing Christ and Satan have in common: they both want us to become like them. Satan, however, wants to trick us into it. Christ wants it to be our choice.

It is my testimony that God is love, that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel of love, and that true discipleship requires sharing that love with all people. It is my hope that we will be able to recognize and reject those false systems of value that demean and divide and instead embrace the love that is true discipleship.

I think we should understand that individuals must shoulder the responsibility for their own preparedness and for their own acquisition of knowledge and of skills and service.

Not to recognize and appreciate the atonement is the greatest of all ingratitude; to ignore Christ is the height of folly; to obey him is the greatest happiness. The greatest display of wisdom that we can demonstrate on this earth is to follow the Lord and to keep his commandments.

The boat we take on life’s journey matters, since it will largely determine how we experience the storms.

There are lots of disappointments in the world that may be hard to understand. Instead of stressing over them or blaming others, sometimes it is best to “be still,” become humble, and put your trust in God that all is well.

Our perspective is limited, so we must act with restraint and compassion. Indeed, our purpose must be to serve. And we, perhaps more than any other group on the planet, are equipped and obligated to establish peace.

Our Savior gave us the perfect example of love, compassion, respite, and rescue. He has beckoned us to come unto Him, to be His hands, and to love one another. May we go forward with a commitment to listen to those spiritual promptings.

All hell may be moved, but as it moves, the devil’s kingdom will be irrevocably shaken, so that many can be shaken loose from his grasp. It is the kingdom of heaven that is coming—triumphant, true, and everlasting!

The catalyst of prayer helped Jesus to cope with suffering, and by his suffering he emancipated all men from death and made possible eternal life. This cardinal fact about the central act of human history, the Atonement, ought to give us pause, therefore, as we face our challenges individually.

God knows you perfectly. He loves you perfectly. His Only Begotten Son, Jesus, has asked you, “Come, follow me.” Thus, in a real and majestic sense, each of us here tonight has been “called to serve”!

“We must, like the prodigal son, arise and go to our father and be prepared for that resplendent reunion.”

An essay about the Prophet Joseph Smith as a seer. Referring to the translation of the Book of Mormon, the author writes that “since Joseph, who knew the ‘particulars’ [of the translating process], chose not to describe them in detail, we cannot presently be definitive about methodology”

The family is the tilt point for a vast number of souls who can go either way—to alienation and anger or to sweetness and service.

[God] wants us to have joy. We cannot do that unless we are free to choose. But neither can we have that joy unless we are willing to be spiritually submissive day in, day out, and unless we exercise that grand and glorious freedom to choose in which people truly matter more than stars.

None of us can or will be immune from the trials of life. However, if we learn to endure our struggles well, they will be turned into blessings in eternity.

Oh, how we adore Jesus for his atonement! For his free gift of immortality to all!

Latter-day Saints should have all the genuine excitement others have in the traditional adventure of learning, including learning secular truths—and we, of all people, should have a little more!

From Joseph Smith, one unlearned and untrained in theology, more printed pages of scripture have come down to us than from any other mortal—in fact, as President Holland has pointed out, more than the combined pages, as available at present, from Moses, Paul, Luke, and Mormon.

Meekness is needed in order for us to be spiritually successful—whether in matters of the intellect, in the management of power, in the dissolution of personal pride, or in coping with the challenges and routine of life. With meekness, living in “thanksgiving daily” is actually possible even in life’s stern seasons.

Furthermore, whether you realize it or not, you are a generation drenched in destiny.

The combined doctrine of God’s foreknowledge and of foreordination is one of the doctrinal roads least traveled by, yet these clearly underline how very long and how perfectly God has loved us and known us with our individual needs and capacities.

“What we will take with us—to the degree we have developed them—will be the cardinal qualities that Jesus has perfected; these are eternal and portable.”

The daily discipleship of which I’m speaking is designed to develop these very attributes that are possessed to perfection by Jesus. These attributes emerge from a consciously chosen way of life; one in which we deny ourselves of all ungodliness and we take up the cross daily—not occasionally, not weekly, not monthly.

Patience is a vital mortal virtue in relation to our faith, our free agency, our attitude toward life, our humility, and our suffering. Moreover, patience will not be an obsolete attribute in the next world.

I love you. I have great hopes for your generation. Thank you for this chance to bear my witness to you today. This is the Lord’s work.

Thus, there are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter—certain hinge points in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while other seconds are spent so as to stretch the soul.

“Those of little faith frequently mistake local cloud cover for general darkness.”

When we speak of shaping our lives through service to others, we are really speaking of living a charitable, Christlike life.

In the midst of our adversity, it may be tempting to think that God has not fulfilled His promises. But we do not lean for repose on desired outcomes. As the song says, we lean for repose on Jesus, who will not desert us to our foes, though all hell may shake around us.

It is our obligation to go to work on our problems and then counsel with the Lord and get the ratifying seal of the Holy Spirit on the conclusions that we’ve reached; and that ratifying seal is the spirit of revelation.

The most important decision you can make in this life is choosing your eternal companion. Don’t settle for less than eternity.

Repentance means that we have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, that we forsake our sins, that we come into the church and kingdom of God on earth and receive the Holy Ghost.

[Joseph Smith] is one of the great dispensation heads, and a dispensation head is a revealer for his age and his period of the knowledge of Christ and of salvation.

If our vision is blurred where this doctrine and these concepts are concerned, or, if knowingly or unknowingly we have fallen prey to any of the false sectarian notions that abound with reference to them, our progress toward eternal life will be slow indeed.

True and saving worship is found only among those who know the truth about God and the Godhead and who understand the true relationship men should have with each member of that Eternal Presidency.

It is incumbent upon us to believe the truth. We have the obligation to find out what is truth, and then we have the obligation to walk in the light and to apply the truths that we have learned to ourselves and to influence others to do likewise.

God grant that we may all believe and know and understand the great eternal verities by which salvation comes and that, believing and knowing and understanding, we may so live as to gain eternal life.

It is in the accepting of our lot and moving forward with what the Lord has asked of us that we discover that the Holy Ghost enjoys our company, angels feel constrained to join us, and the heavens open to our vision.

We are taught to honor and celebrate those great men who wrote and voted for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. But none of what they committed themselves to … none of that would have been worth any more than the paper it was written on had it not been for those who were fighting to make it happen.

Daily prayer, daily scripture study, and daily service are three important spiritual antioxidants that help guarantee we will retain our spiritual vision and have the Spirit to guide us in our day-to-day activities.

I wish you every success and hope your wildest and fondest dreams come true. Clearly you are the hope of our nation, our church, and your families.

I hope that when you are at the end of your days you will not have walked past opportunities that you should have taken or challenges you should have accepted. I hope you will draw each day upon your secular and spiritual knowledge to find your way in faith.

Just as you have passed through the halls at BYU, I hope the Spirit of the Y has passed through you and become a part of you.

I believe you are the hope of things to come in the sciences, the home, politics, technology, medicine, engineering, the arts, and society as a whole. There is no better time than today to catch—then realize—the vision of your possibilities.

The power of choice is within you. The roads are clearly marked: one offering animal existence, the other life abundant…

The Spirit will help you remember that our potential is beyond our present capacity. We cannot attain it in our current condition and we cannot attain it on our own. We need help. We need a helper. We need Jesus, who is our Helper.

The Savior, both in His own recorded words and through the words of His holy prophets, has invited us to come unto Him, to experiment for ourselves on the truthfulness of His gospel, and to claim the attendant blessings.

It is my belief that we can obtain this goal of celestial glory as we seek and follow the divine feedback that comes through the still, small voice of the Holy Ghost.

Act upon what you know to be true and your righteous works will perfect your faith. Your lives will be full and wonderful.

Change yourself. Decide today “I am going to make the Church and kingdom of God the center of my life!” Position yourself firmly inside God’s kingdom; allow it to encompass you.

Civil War historian James McPherson details important events from history that show how and why the Civil War still matters today.

Much of my time here at BYU is spent teaching students how to build therapeutic relationships. Over the years I have come to realize that there isn’t much to do with the gospel that isn’t about relationships—either our relationships with Heavenly Father and the Savior or with our fellowmen.

We cannot be slackers in our commitment to the Lord . . . Our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and our gratitude for His sacrifice for us compels us to serve by bearing testimony of Him, even Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God.

Becoming decisive is part of our spiritual growing up. This growing up requires constant decision making. We must learn to be decisive, because indecision is no choice at all. If we fail to choose, we fail to act.

Individually and collectively our destiny lies in the ability to connect the points of light in our lives so that we can see the broad patterns of eternity.

God wants you to find and keep joy in this world and in the world to come. You have been specially endowed with a celestial nature that is to grow into a fullness of joy.

There is, however, a soul-expanding kind of doubt that proceeds from an attitude of humility—the species of humility that openly admits our weaknesses. When we begin to see ourselves and our weaknesses clearly, we arrive at a state of vulnerability similar to what Joseph Smith faced as he unwittingly prepared himself for the Sacred Grove.

Besides a sincere apology, repentance includes striving to forsake our shortcomings and weaknesses. We strive to keep our promises to do the dishes. We focus on not being grumpy and not snapping at our spouse. We endeavor to become better listeners and less judgmental. As we continually repent, we constantly try to improve ourselves.

There is so much to learn. So be curious. Keep your sense of wonder about the world. We have been given a great promise over and over again. Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find.