Sterling W. Sill

First Quorum of the Seventy (October 1, 1976 – December 31, 1978)
Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (April 6, 1954 – October 1, 1976)

General Conference Addresses

• April 1978 General Conference
  • The Poetry of Success
    • “If we think negative thoughts, we develop negative minds. If we think depraved thoughts, we develop depraved minds. On the other hand, if we think celestial thoughts, which are the kind of thoughts that God thinks, then we develop celestial minds.”
• October 1976 General Conference
  • To Die Well
    • “It seems to me to be a very helpful procedure to spend a little time preliving our death. That is, what kind of person would you like to be when the last hour of your life arrives?”
• October 1975 General Conference
  • Success Stories
    • “As an interesting part of the human personality, each individual person has been endowed by creation with a collector’s instinct. And as the squirrel collects and stores up acorns, so we collect stamps and butterflies and coins, and stocks and bonds and insurance policies and real estate and bank accounts. We also collect attitudes, skills, habits, and personality traits.”
• April 1975 General Conference
  • Birth
    • “The greatest accomplishment of my life is that I was successful in getting myself born, and I am just awfully pleased about that. There just isn’t anything that I would rather have had happen to me than to have been born.”
• October 1974 General Conference
  • Transfusion
    • “May God help us that we may follow him. We can follow him in his faith, we can follow him in his doctrines, we can follow him in his godliness. And we may eventually become even as he is.”
• October 1973 General Conference
  • A Fortune to Share
    • “If I were asked to give the best idea of which I am capable, it would be closely related to this, that we should get out of the junk business and then start laying up treasures in heaven by sharing with others that vast fortune which each of us has or can get possession of.”
    • “One of the shortcomings of even the holy scriptures is that they are not automatic. That is, they will not work unless we do.”
• April 1973 General Conference
  • Hold Up Your Hands
    • “With a pair of willing, ambitious, capable, clean hands, we can move mountains and we can save souls.”
    • “You must be a convert before you can be a disciple. You must be a convert before you can be a leader. You must be a convert before you can show other people the way.”
    • “We ought to spend a lot more time than we ordinarily do in increasing the volume and intensity of our righteous desires.”
• October 1972 General Conference
  • Keep the Commandments
    • “The religion of Christ is not just an idea; it is an activity. It is not just something for us to think about; it is something for us to do.”
• April 1972 General Conference
  • Medicine for the Soul
    • “One of the greatest good fortunes of our day is that God has not only spoken to the people upon the earth, but he came in person in the greatest manifestation of his being ever known in the world. And not only did he come in person, but he caused that his message should be written down in three great volumes of new scripture outlining in every detail the simple principles of the gospel of Christ. So again, as of old, we hear that life-giving, authoritative pronouncement: “Thus saith the Lord.””
• October 1971 General Conference
  • Thou Shalt Not
    • “We always run into a great deal of trouble when we fail to make firm and lasting decisions to govern important matters.”
    • “Certainly we place a serious handicap upon ourselves when we neglect to definitely make up our minds about those important questions of morality, honesty, integrity, industry, and religion.”
    • “The kind of emphasis that is given to an idea is sometimes about as important as the idea itself. Recently a minister on the radio said that he never talked about the Ten Commandments in his church anymore because they were too far out of date. He also said that their language was too harsh for the weak sensibilities of our day. This minister felt that instead of using such strong terms as command and Thou shalt not, the Lord should have employed some softer words such as I recommend or I suggest or I advise. But soft words frequently produce soft attitudes with weak meanings and built-in violations.”
    • “Because we are breaking the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments are also breaking us.”
• April 1971 General Conference
  • Great Experiences
    • “Certainly the most successful lives are those that have the most worthwhile experiences. The religion of Christ itself is not so much a set of ideas as it is a set of activities. The purpose of the Church is to help us translate the principles of the gospel of Christ into constructive, meaningful human experience. And everyone should work toward this end by a daily practice of thinking some uplifting thoughts, listening to some fine music, reading some stimulating literature, doing some good deeds, and having some great experiences every day.”
    • “Whenever excellence is recounted, it is increased.”
    • “Life begins every morning. Life begins when we begin. And our real lives begin when we determine to live by every word of the Lord.”
    • “I am presently in possession of the world’s most valuable information. I know that God lives, that we were created in his image, and that by obeying the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the offspring of God may eventually hope to become like their eternal parents.”
• October 1970 General Conference
  • God and Country
    • “But this catastrophe must not happen and it will not happen if we but follow the directions that have already been given by the greatest of all military authorities. God offered to save Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten righteous people could be found therein and God will prosper us if we will faithfully carry forward our double assignment of so serving God and our country that many hundreds of millions of truth-seeking, freedom-loving, God-fearing men and women may be entitled to the everlasting blessings of our eternal Heavenly Father.”
• April 1970 General Conference
  • Our Temptations Upward
    • “The Pacific Ocean may contain more water than the Atlantic Ocean, but it can’t sink any ship a bit more easily. And our tremendously increased present-day evils have no more power over us than the ancient temptations had over our fathers, except as we provide them with a more enticing entertainment.”
• October 1969 General Conference
  • The Sabbath a Cure
    • “If we were looking for some program to cure all of the problems that presently beset our world, we might well find it by properly observing the Sabbath day.”
    • “This is the day when we put on our best clothes and think our best thoughts and read our best books. This is the day when we associate with the people that we like the most. This is the day for which we usually reserve the best meal of the week. This is the day when we lay aside the cares that usually concern us during the other six days and go to the house of prayer and let our minds reach upward and try to understand the real purpose for which this day was set apart.”
    • “And we bring all sorts of serious problems upon ourselves when we use this day for pleasure, worldliness, and evil. We sometimes make the Sabbath our least important day by putting on our most unsightly clothes and doing our most ordinary jobs. As a consequence of what we do, many of our churches remain empty and the holy scriptures remain on the shelf unopened. When we lose the Sabbath day spirit, we are likely to build bars in our homes instead of altars. And sometimes we can get more interested in horse races and baseball games than in the celestial kingdom.”
    • “Next to God, the most inspiring creation in the universe is a great human being formed in God’s image.”
    • “If we could have visited with Abraham as he herded his sheep on the deserts of Palestine, we may not have been greatly impressed. But if we could have been at his side as he stood among the noble and great in the antemortal councils of God, or if we could be with him now as he serves in God’s heavenly kingdom, the experience would likely be a much more memorable one. And what wonderful people we might discover each Sabbath day if we could see our brothers and sisters in the light of their real identity as children of God.”
• October 1968 General Conference
  • Behold the Man
    • “Jesus was the greatest teacher because he looked with the clearest insight into human lives; and better than anyone else, he understood the effects of those common everyday events on which our success continues to turn.”
    • “Many people place a very serious handicap upon themselves when they think of Christ only in his ancient settings of sowing and teaching and suffering.”
• April 1968 General Conference
  • We Would See Jesus
    • “We are so near and yet we may be so far away. We are standing on the brink of an eternal life, and yet each must take the steps that will bring him there.”
    • “God has provided our earth with great underground reservoirs and buried rivers that may be brought to the surface to keep our earth productive and beautiful. Likewise, there are some great unseen spiritual powers that can be used to vitalize our spirits and make our lives beautiful and happy.”
• October 1967 General Conference
  • Walnuts
    • “But God did not put his best gifts into walnuts. Every human soul was created in the image of God, and each of us was endowed with a set of the attributes and potentialities of Deity. And the greatest idea that I know of in the world is that everyone who lives the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ will be given a far more miraculous power whereby he will be able to attract from his environment all of the elements necessary to become even as God is.”
• April 1967 General Conference
  • The Earth’s Sabbath
    • “What a great time to be alive, when Christ himself will be our lawgiver and righteous men and women, from both sides of the veil, will live and reign with Christ for a thousand years. On the other hand, what a tragic time it will be for those who fail to qualify. Suppose that we should find ourselves among that group mentioned by John the Revelator when he said, “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.””
• April 1966 General Conference
  • The Second Coming
    • “But one of the most important events on the divine timetable of the world’s future is the glorious second coming of Jesus Christ. This will probably be the most momentous happening ever to take place in the history of the world. The most often mentioned event in the entire Bible is that wonderful, yet awful experience that we will have when Jesus Christ shall come to judge our world. There are many important gospel doctrines mentioned in the Bible only briefly, and some not at all. The new birth is mentioned in the Bible nine times; baptism is mentioned 52 times, repentance is mentioned 89, but the second coming of Christ is mentioned over 1,500 times in the Old Testament and 300 times in the New Testament. If God thought this subject that important, he must have wanted us to do something about it. The Holy Bible forecasts events before they happen, and much of our history has actually been written down before it occurred.”
• October 1965 General Conference
  • Ye Are Gods
    • “It was important in our development that we see good and evil side by side. We needed to be tested and tried with the temptations of mortality and to develop a godly character by the exercise of our own free agency.”
    • “Certainly God must have had a great destiny in mind for us when he promised to give us dominion over the works of his hands and to put all things under our feet.”
• April 1965 General Conference
  • The Death Instinct
    • “We have been given the priesthood, which is the authority to act in the name of the Lord. But we ourselves must develop the leadership, which is the ability to act in the name of the Lord. And I suppose that one is not of great consequence without the other. That is, what good would come from a missionary having the authority to make converts if he did not also have the ability to make converts?”
    • “No one ever gets off the straight and narrow way at right angles, and no sin is born fully grown. Every sin is a minor one to begin with. Percentage-wise, very few people will ever lose their blessings because they have become murderers or sons of perdition. As someone has pointed out, it isn’t the giant redwoods that trip us up as we walk through the forest, it’s the vines and the underbrush.”
    • “The pathway to exaltation has been perfectly marked and brilliantly lighted, and no one needs to get off the straight and narrow way except by his own choice.”
• April 1964 General Conference
  • J Day
    • “Someone has said that the most important event in life is death. Death is the gateway to immortality. We live to die, and then we die to live. Ordinarily we don’t like to think about death because it is associated with unpleasantness.”
• October 1963 General Conference
  • To Have Dominion
    • “The most inspiring thing about the life of Jesus was not his ability to quiet the storm or control the tempest, but his absolute control of himself.”
    • “Each of us has been given a magnificent instrument called a brain, which was intended to play a much more prominent part in our religious life than it sometimes does. The brain, not the feelings or the passions, was designated by God to be the presiding officer of the personality. And when we honor the authority of the mind, we become masters instead of slaves.”
    • “Love alone is an insufficient basis for marriage. Anyone can fall in love with anything.”
    • “Frequently we would rather be ruined by praise than sawed by criticism. It is pretty serious business when we turn our backs on good merely because we don’t like someone’s tone of voice or because what is said doesn’t quite suit our fancy.”
    • “The chief characteristic of sin, and the chief characteristic of lack of success is our failure to manage our thoughts, our attitudes, and our ambitions.”
• April 1963 General Conference
  • This Same Jesus
    • “Jesus had built his Church upon the foundation of apostles and prophets. When the foundation was destroyed, the building crumbled. In time what had once been a divine organization became merely a human institution.”
    • “This same Jesus has informed us anew that he has not changed his mind about the importance of this and the other great Christian doctrines.”
• October 1962 General Conference
  • What About the Man?
    • “In an absolute sense, perfection in this life may be an impossibility. But in many ways a state of near perfection is a reasonable goal for us.”
    • “If the people living in the city of Enoch could be perfect, then the people living in your city and the people living in my city can be perfect also.”
    • “The ones suffering the strongest temptations from evil would likely be those living closest to evil. It has been pointed out that no one ever fell into a mud puddle who didn’t first go too close to it. We are not necessarily complimenting ourselves when we boast of the difficulty we have in living our religion, just as we would not be complimenting ourselves to confess difficulty in restraining ourselves from being thieves and murderers.”
    • “It is not difficult to live the religion of Christ if that is what we really want to do. That is, it is just as easy for an honest man to be honest as it is for a dishonest man to be dishonest.”
    • “We become godly or moral or obedient, just as we become anything else, by practice. And only as we live the principles of the gospel can we really know of their truthfulness and value.”
    • “If you want to be faithful, act “as if” you are already faithful. Do the things that faithful people do. Go to church, say your prayers, love God, refrain from evil, study the scriptures, be honest with yourself, and everyone else. And if you would like to be perfect, act “as if” you were already perfect. Don’t go around glorying in your sins and weaknesses. We can come very close to perfection if we really get the spirit of it in our hearts. If we really want to obey God, we should act “as if” we were already obedient. We should think obedience, love obedience, practice obedience, and we should allow no exceptions to obedience. The fewer the exceptions to perfection, the nearer we get to perfection.”
    • “If we believe that honor is better than dishonor, then we should immediately begin practicing honor, not just in big things, but in all things.”
• April 1962 General Conference
  • Build Well
    • “The greatest responsibility that is ever entrusted to any human being is that of building his own personality. The first soul that anyone should bring to God is his own soul.”
    • “Nothing is ever denied to well-directed effort, and nothing is ever achieved without it.”
    • “This discord which we so frequently permit to develop between deed and creed is at the root of innumerable wrongs in our society, and it gives institutions and men split personalities.”
• October 1961 General Conference
  • Men in Step
    • “Then the greatest intelligence of heaven gave the most important success formula ever given, saying, “Follow me.” And every human soul must finally be judged by how well he obeys that single command.”
• April 1961 General Conference
  • Lift Up Your Eyes
    • “We should lift up our eyes to see our duty and to understand our opportunities; to accept our responsibilities and to put truth in force in our lives. We should lift up our eyes to worship God and to serve our fellow men as the Lord has commanded.”
    • “The first step toward any failure is always merely to look down, to let earthly things absorb our interests. It is pretty difficult to look down and to look up at the same time.”
• April 1960 General Conference
  • The Virtues of Fathers
    • “We should remember that any disobedience to God or any other offenses that we pick up in our own lives are soon transmitted to others, particularly our children.”
• October 1959 General Conference
  • We Believe the Bible
    • “One of our most urgent present-day needs is to houseclean our thinking. Because two opposite thoughts cannot co-exist in the mind at the same moment, the best way to get rid of undesirable thoughts is by antedoting them with good. The best way to get darkness out of a room is to fill it with light. The best way to kill the negative is to cultivate the positive, and the best way to improve our lives is to improve our thoughts. And one of the best ways to improve our thoughts is to develop a love of great literature.”
• April 1959 General Conference
  • Show Us the Father
    • “This question points out what is probably the greatest responsibility of our lives—not only to know God but also to understand the plan of the gospel and to live in harmony therewith. The proper relationship between men and God gives life its purpose. It doesn’t matter very much whether we ride in an oxcart or on an interplanetary missile if our journey is purposeless.”
    • “It is because our greatest need is for God that the first and most important commandment centers in our maintaining a proper relationship to him. And the most serious sins are our abuses of that relationship, wherein we turn away from God.”
    • “Life in this world is not man centered—it is God centered. As so many are doing in our day, the prodigal son squandered his inheritance because his world was centered in himself rather than in God.”
• October 1958 General Conference
  • The Big Three
    • “Our lives have been divided into three general periods. First there was a long pre-mortal existence when we lived as the spirit children of God. This is followed by a brief mortality. Then comes an everlasting immortality. There is a definite purpose to be accomplished in each of these periods, and our success in each depends upon what we did in those periods preceding. In this respect we might compare life with a three-act play. If you came into the theater after the first act had been finished and left before the third act began, you might not understand the play.”
• April 1958 General Conference
  • Lest We Forget
    • “Our national problem is surplus; our national disease is overweight; our national sin is forgetfulness. And the greatest need of our lives is to remember the source of our blessings.”
    • “The highest standard of living is important, but it is far more important to have the highest standard of honor and the highest standard of obedience and the highest standard of “remembering.” Then our country will be safe and our freedom and our happiness will be secure.”
• April 1957 General Conference
  • Father’s Day
    • “In fact, it has been thought that our civilization could never have survived for half a century if it had not been for this one day in seven that we call Sunday. This is the day when we try to reach a pinnacle in our lives by living at our best. This is the day when we pay particular attention to the washing of our bodies. This is the day when we put on our best clothes and think our best thoughts and read our best books. This is the day when we associate with the people we love the most. This is the day for which we usually reserve the best meal of the week. This is the day when we lay aside the cares that usually concern us during the other six days while we go to the house of prayer and let our minds reach upward to try to understand the things of God and eternity. This is the special day when we worship God, and honor Him in our lives. The proper observance of the Sabbath is the process by which we put our lives in harmony with Deity.”
    • “Our spiritual health must always be primarily our own responsibility.”
    • “One of the most devastating of all human emotions is the sense of being alone, of not being wanted, of being unworthy. Suppose that sometime we find that because we have weighted our interests in the wrong places, that we have become unfit for the presence of God and have therefore lost our greatest blessing. A peculiar thing happens when we stand on our heads so to speak, for then it seems to us that all the world is upside-down, and we are then unable properly to appraise values.”
• October 1956 General Conference
  • The Dimensions of Life
    • “Now if mortal life is worth so much, how much is eternal life worth? And what would it mean to us if it were lost?”
    • “Then we walked by sight. We knew God. He is our Father. We lived with him. We saw his glorious, resurrected celestial body. We felt the wonder of his celestial mind and the delight of his wonderful personality. We wanted to be like him. We knew we must follow his example. We must learn obedience. We must learn to walk a little way by faith. We must pass the final test of mortality where we are free to choose for ourselves. We must be educated and proven and sanctified and redeemed.”
    • “Mostly salvation is lost by a series of slow leaks—a little indecision, a little indifference, a little procrastination, a little slothfulness.”
• April 1956 General Conference
  • Famine
    • “It is a little bit difficult to understand “a famine” when one of our most pressing problems is surplus and oversupply. But it is even more difficult when men have pushed God out of their interests, to understand another kind of famine which he foretold should come upon the earth in consequence of disobedience and sin.”
    • “In the severity of this famine of spiritual understanding, men have denied personality to deity. They have also deprived him of his body. They have left him without senses, faculties or feelings. And as a natural consequence, the world in large part is still where Paul found it nineteen hundred years ago, worshiping at the feet of an “unknown God” and this without proper understanding of even the most simple principles taught by Jesus and recorded in the Bible.”
• October 1955 General Conference
  • What Shall I Do with Jesus
    • “Jesus was appointed and ordained to be the Savior of the world and the Redeemer of men, and there is no other name given by which man can be saved. What Pilate and the Jews did to Jesus did not alter that relationship in the slightest degree, either for them or for us. For Jesus also bore our sins, and we are therefore party to his suffering and his atonement.”
    • “But we might ask ourselves this question: Why didn’t they know? There is probably only one answer: They lacked the honest effort, earnest inquiry, and humble prayer necessary to find the truth. But in large measure, we make exactly the same mistakes. When we absent ourselves from sacrament meeting, we don’t really understand what we are doing. When we fail to pay our tithing or when we are married “until death do us part,” we know not what we do. It is our ignorance as well as our sins that stands between us and our salvation.”
    • “If the Jews suffered so great a penalty for their sins committed largely in ignorance, what about us?”
• April 1955 General Conference
  • We Believe in God
    • “When we say “We believe in God,” we mean much more than merely that God exists. We mean that we understand something about the kind of being he is, that he is literally the Father of our spirits, and, according to the great law of the universe, the offspring may sometime become like the parent.”
    • “But the most thrilling and motivating part of this idea is what the words themselves indicate, that “We believe in God.” We trust him. We believe that he knows his business, that regardless of chance or the errors of men, his purposes will prevail.”
    • “A discouraged person is always a weak person.”
    • “You can’t merely snap your fingers and get great faith in God, any more than you can snap your fingers and get great musical ability. Faith takes hold of us only when we take hold of it.”
    • “The great truths of life become known only to those who are prepared to accept them. So I would like to present for your consideration the thrilling temptations of the gospel, the temptations to live worthily of the celestial kingdom, to attain a celestial body, a celestial mind, a celestial personality, to live with a celestial family and celestial friends on a celestial earth.”
• October 1954 General Conference
  • Our Greatest Responsibility
    • “Following this suggestion has been a wonderful experience to me, and presently I am rereading one of my ten authors. This particular author has written five books. One of them is entitled the Old Testament. Another is the New Testament. One is the Book of Mormon. One is the Doctrine and Covenants and one is the Pearl of Great Price. Each time we read a book with a new purpose it becomes a new book. This is not because the words in the book have changed, but because we bring to it a new outlook; for example, one might read the Bible to get from it its literature, or its history, or its philosophy, or its psychology, or its theology, but I am not re-reading the standard works of the Church primarily for any of these reasons. Rather, I am trying to get better acquainted with the author.”
    • “To discover God is the greatest discovery that anyone ever makes in his lifetime, and in trying to understand the great responsibility that goes with such a discovery, I got down on my knees and asked God to help me bear an acceptable witness of him to all of those with whom I should come in contact.”
• April 1954 General Conference
  • In the Service of Our Father
    • “I here have been a number of circumstances that have combined themselves together this morning to produce in my heart great humility, accompanied by a feeling of inadequacy to discharge properly the responsibilities of this appointment. I pray that I might receive the necessary strength to fulfil those obligations. I am grateful for the confidence of the brethren who are responsible for this appointment. I also appreciate very much your sustaining vote. I promise the General Authorities of the Church, as well as the general Church membership, and Him whose name the Church bears, that I will do the very best I can.”
    • “The real worth of a man is not in himself alone, but in what he stands for.”
    • “It is more important to build a great character than to build a great skyscraper. We know that the worth of souls is great, but mostly we are not great for what we are, we are great or what we may become, and it is my hope and prayer in my own behalf that I may develop those qualities that will enable me to accomplish the duties of this assignment as is expected of me by my Father in heaven and those who preside over me in the Church.”

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