BYU Speeches
Chronological Bibliography

Joy is the key to our spiritual survival in the trying times in which we live, as well as in the trying times that lie ahead of us.

There is great power in stories. They can help us learn important truths at many levels.

Our Heavenly Father has provided us with great and marvelous gifts for our journey here in mortality—and for the greatest quest of all: to come unto our Savior and gain eternal life.

How are you exercising your agency to further the work of the Lord?

As we consistently go to Heavenly Father in prayer, we develop a relationship with Him that helps us see ourselves and Him in a clearer light. He will guide us!

Will you shift in your seat and succumb to popular opinion, or will you stand firm and confident in the counsels and blessings of your loving God and let Him have His head?

Marcus Roberts and The Modern Jazz Generation pair up with BYU professor Gregory Clark to perform music and discuss democracy through the lens of jazz.

I invite you to look deep in your souls and ask how you can fulfill your purpose of being a child of God by loving the Lord and loving your neighbor more faithfully than you ever have before.

I know that Jesus Christ is the light that makes forgiveness possible and that as we forgive each other and ourselves, we will feel His love and experience His light in this life and even more fully in the eternal world to come.

Does your pattern reflect exercising faith, seeking to know His will, trusting the Lord, heeding His counsel, and keeping the commandments, even when you cannot suppose what lies ahead?

I love everything this university stands for and am truly honored to receive an honorary doctorate as a culminating event in my life.

I pray that you will light spiritual beacon fires that burn brightly in the lives of the students and that you will sound doctrinal trumpet calls that will echo in their hearts and minds throughout their lives.

If we are consumed with conviction for making our campus a place of belonging, we will take steps in the long journey to root out racism from BYU.

President Kevin J Worthen shares insights on how we should act despite outside influences.

At those times when you wonder if there is any reason to hope, when you wonder if anyone cares—or if anyone should care—I invite you to ask God what He thinks of you—what He really thinks of you.

First, we need to always remember to turn to Heavenly Father and be willing to submit to Him. He loves us.

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

We are not meant to accomplish this life alone. While we are waiting, we have angels ascending and descending all around us.

True beauty is the result of a subtle alchemy and a delicate balance, which in large part comes from our personal inner light, rather than from aesthetic or physical criteria alone.

What is it that you think you want to know to consider yourself an educated person, to be part of civic and professional life alongside people from different religions in this, the most religiously diverse nation in human history?

Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can unite and bring peace to people of all races and nationalities.

If learning scientific theories puts your faith in jeopardy, choose your faith! Choose your faith until you can better understand the science—or until science can provide better explanations. I firmly believe that both truths—religious and scientific—exist in harmony.

Our great expectation for you is that you will love, serve, and worship the Savior and that you will bless the world like no other generation.

What does spiritual thriving mean to me? Very simply, it means seeking, recognizing, and enjoying experiences with the Spirit of God.

Ramona Hopkins, recipient of BYU’s prestigious Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Lecturer Award, discusses five things her research has taught her.

A disciple of Jesus Christ must be actively engaged, patient in the process, sufficiently humble, dedicated to the Savior, and filled with faith that the Master Teacher is leading us in the right direction.

While all human beings share a common bond as beloved spirit children of Heavenly Parents, each of us is a unique individual with individual personalities, experiences, and gifts. And each of these individual characteristics can contribute to greater unity.

Whether we are right in the middle of a global pandemic, experiencing devastating loss and grief, or we are experiencing the joyful moments of life, we must never forget to express gratitude.

We are blessed to live and serve in a most remarkable season of the dispensation of the fulness of times. I testify that no unhallowed hand and no pandemic can keep the Lord’s holy work from progressing.

Tenemos la bendición de vivir y servir en una de las épocas más notables de la dispensación del cumplimiento de los tiempos. Testifico que ninguna mano impía y ninguna pandemia pueden impedir que la santa obra del Señor progrese.

As we enter into a covenant relationship with [God], we will experience the joy and exhilaration of becoming one with Him. When we give Him the reins, He will make of our lives more than we could ever dream, more than we could ever do running wild through life on our own.

I suggest focusing on what really matters. In doing so, you will see that strengthening your spirituality and becoming a spiritually-minded person, though it requires effort and diligence, can be simple. Hold on and keep pedaling!

As we strive to fulfill these divinely appointed responsibilities as part of the Lord’s work, the Church provides a multitude of resources. These are blessings that are pouring down upon us from heaven.

Faith that is “tested, wounded, but . . . here” is a powerful, transformative kind of faith. That kind of faith recognizes that because we look through a glass, darkly, we will still have questions. It is a faith that coexists with questions and paradoxes. It is a faith that has battle scars but also enduring resonance.

The need for us to hear the voice of the true Shepherd has never been greater. His sheep still hear His voice. The influence of the Holy Ghost is available for us in our lives every day.

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.

Our commitment should be to be educated well—broadly with a humility that opens us to the widest possibilities for knowledge and hopefully, with an eye to how learning can enable us to contribute to a better future, not just for ourselves but for all the world.

As representatives of Christ, we can work hard to heal the painful legacies of racism that we have inherited, legacies that manifest in new and pernicious ways. Taking this action will help us alleviate the suffering of others. This is what the Savior did for each and every one of us.

As an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, I invoke these blessings upon you, that as you look to the Savior and trust in Him, you will be blessed with hope to overcome perplexity, with spiritual settledness to cut through commotion, with ears to hear and a heart to always remember the word of the Lord, and with the discernment to see things as they really are.

As we leave BYU, we have the opportunity to not only choose what we will do but who we will become.

BYU graduates before you have walked this path and can relate to what you are experiencing. You are not alone! The support you have felt as a BYU student doesn’t end just because you are graduating.

“I express gratitude and appreciation to each student, faculty, and staff member who is building on BYU’s firm foundation of bedrock virtues, values, and principles while learning appropriately when and how to adapt in changing and challenging times.”

Music is a language that speaks to everyone. Its healing power is expressed by people in every country in the world. Whether we listen to music in church, at home, or in the concert hall, we do it to feel better about our circumstances.

“However, at this time, acting entirely on my own and without authority from anyone else, I hereby confer upon each and every one of you the title of super graduate. You have earned this title by being resilient, durable, and adaptable throughout a global pandemic that has affected this university more than any health crisis in our lifetimes.”

Indeed, we “enter to learn,” but may we more fully embrace our calling to then “go forth to serve.” As the Lord Himself told us, it is in the service of others and in taking up our own crosses of suffering that we will find our own selves

I believe that our Father in Heaven expects us to develop this unity and cultivate our diverse talents and abilities so that we can be counted among the “few” servants in the allegory of the olive trees charged with pruning and edifying His vineyard (Jacob 5:70). He has spared the vineyard, as well as all of us, for this sacred purpose.

To create a home-court advantage for every member of the campus community, organizational efforts must be matched by individual efforts. This is a one-on-one, personal, individual ministry, and we need everyone!

So how did all the strange modern art, the thinking about what makes a tissue box a tissue box, and those unusual YA novels influence me? Well, if I hadn’t already been familiar with all the genre-bending, boundary-blurring artistic work that came before, I couldn’t possibly have conceived of something like this weird little haiku novel.

The plan is for us to seek our way from simplicity through complexity, by study and by faith, until we arrive at the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

The Holy Spirit is the conduit through which you can feel how much your Father in Heaven loves you and how Jesus Christ, through His Atonement, desires to change both your mud and sand to rock and to be your sure foundation.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—our elder brother—is there to pick us up, dry our tears, and heal the wounds we have received while living in a fallen world. The point of my address today is simply this: a humbling duty we have as disciples of Christ is to be His hands in helping make this happen.

I pray that we keep our gaze elevated so that we can see our trials through the lens of their purpose, so that we can become more Christlike and gain the eternal win. As we do so, our hearts will be filled with peace rather than fear.

Guided by personal revelation, the creative art of living and becoming requires our full attention and intention to “Yes, and . . .” because that is magic—where the unexpected not only happens but creates something we could have never done on our own.

In both our physical and digital worlds, we should learn to create proximity and immediacy rather than distance and division. My experiences in the arts have taught me over and over that our bodies matter一here and now一and in the eternities.

What fills me with profound awe is that our Brother Jesus Christ would be willing to “descend from his throne divine” to suffer, bleed, and die to rescue rebellious souls like me and you. His sacrifice is “sufficient . . . to redeem, and to justify” all of humanity, and at the same time He succors you and me personally. That is truly awesome!

If you desire it with all your heart, God will guide you through this mortal life, and He will wait with open arms to embrace you in the Resurrection. No matter our shortcomings, no matter our flaws, God can heal, inspire, and cleanse us. For He is the God of new beginnings.

Please, from one who owes so much to this school and who has loved her so deeply for so long, keep her not only standing but standing for what she uniquely and prophetically was meant to be.

I invite you to take opportunities in department and college councils to counsel together about ways in which you might help all members of the BYU campus community feel a greater sense of belonging.

In short, our end goal in this effort is to create “a community of belonging” and “an environment of belonging” in which each member is valued and all realize their divine potential as children of God.

I hope that because of our efforts to create a community of belonging, we may one day say, “The campus of BYU, the mountains of BYU, the buildings of BYU, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer as their hearts were knit together in love.”

The Savior has commanded us to not be afraid, even when the unexpected storms of life are raging around us. This commandment is often easier to articulate than to implement. But, fortunately, the Savior has also promised us that “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”

Enduring to the end is not a separate step in the doctrine of Christ—as though we complete the first four steps and then hunker down, grit our teeth, and wait to die. No, enduring to the end is actively and intentionally repeating the steps in the doctrine of Christ.

BYU is a unique institution in all the world—a community of saint scholars, a community of saint students, an unparalleled community of academic and spiritual excellence that could only be possible as a result of the Restoration.

We choose the King of the kingdom when we choose to follow the counsel of those He has chosen: the living prophets. Choose to stay connected. The consequences are eternal.

Dignity and demeanor in our discipleship begin with understanding who we are. . . . We look to our Brother Jesus Christ as our perfect example and seek to emulate the divine attributes He demonstrated throughout His life.

Being a beloved community means daily beginning again at building this beloved community.

What is your “for good” at this time in your life? You also have a noble responsibility to use your strength and influence for good.

There are certain rules on this earth that are critically important not only to our temporal journey but to our eternal journey as well.

Take advantage of every resource and do your best to keep your spirit, your body, and your mind strong.

As you increase your efforts from now through Christmas, the desire to continue these habits beyond Christmas will stay with you, and your progress as one of the Savior’s disciples will grow.

My prayer and plea for you, as you start this new semester, is that you choose to humble yourselves in all your endeavors; that you choose to be open to new ideas, including those that come by revelation; that you fully and accurately recognize your individual talents and potential as literal offspring of heavenly parents; that you recognize that same divinity in every other person with whom you interact; that you avoid contention; that you love and serve others; and, most of all, that you come to know the Savior more by making time for Him each and every day.

By focusing on Jesus Christ, we invite His Spirit into our lives. Through that Spirit, Christ changes us. Through that Spirit, He expands our perspective and helps us see things as they really are, which helps us judge both others and ourselves in a more charitable and accurate light.

To what should you be attached so that you will be safe? What is your dock, your mooring, your anchor? It is your relationship with the Savior Jesus Christ.

“What we need from everyone, from those of you solidly in the Church as well as those struggling to hold on, is always the same: powerful faith, faith that sustains us here and now, not just on the day of judgment or somewhere in celestial glory.”

“I am old enough to bear witness of a God who thinks “peace” regarding us and not ‘evil,’ of a God who will ‘hearken’ unto every single one of us in our times of need.”

“I hope you will seek holiness, seek learning, seek revelation, seek the best gifts, seek Christlike exemplars, and, above all, ‘seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written.’”

“What Christ knew is that despite the tumult we feel all around us, God will prevail in the end.”

“What Deb and I have found around the country is that the closer up you see the United States—the more you are at the neighborhood and community level—the more hopeful you feel.”

“I encourage you to use every talent and every bit of knowledge and inspiration you have to change the world, but while you are doing that, I invite you to make a difference in the world by being true peacemakers.”

“To be a good neighbor is to wonder how your words and actions will impact others rather than to wonder how you will be impacted. This is not to say that we should abandon personal safety or exhaust ourselves in unhealthy ways. Instead, we should build the faith to understand that when we are unselfish, our needs will also be taken care of.”