Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Phillips Brooks

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men!

Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, 'Christ is risen,' but 'I shall rise.'

To say, 'well done' to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.

Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.

No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.

The feet of the humblest may walk in the field Where the feet of the Holiest trod, This, then, is the marvel to mortals revealed.

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.

Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.

The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.

Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing - where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do.

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.

No man has come to true greatness who has not felt that his life belongs to his race, and that which God gives to him, He gives him for mankind.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.

I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.

It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.

No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind.

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.

Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week.

Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.

Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.

A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it... you cannot do everything.

The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.

Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.

Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.

Those who help a child help humanity with an immediateness which no other help given to human creature in any other stage of human life can possibly give again.

How silently, how silently The wonderous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.

We never become truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.

Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.

Character - Some day, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.

The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.

Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.

Feed on Christ, and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.

You must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing.

We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.

Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall "be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God"; for that, and that alone, is peace.

Distrust your religion unless it is cheerful, unless it turns every act and deed to music and exults in attempts to catch the harmony of the new life.?

Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.

No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.

The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.

The man, who has begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more simply without.

For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.

O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.

The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will. Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.

It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.