Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Phillips Brooks - Page 2

You may look through the streets of heaven, asking each how they came to b there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a person who is morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle.

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer; Death is strong, but Life is stronger; Stronger than the dark, the light; Stronger than the wrong, the right; Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.

Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal.

Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door the dark night wakes - the glory breaks, Christmas comes once more.

Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart.

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.

When you discover you've been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.

Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.

Obedience completes itself in understanding.

Faith says not, 'I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent it,' but, 'God sent it, and so it must be good for me.' Faith, walking in the dark with God, only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely.

There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.

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.

The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.

Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings.

To believe in the God over us and around us and not in the God within us - that would be a powerless and fruitless faith.

Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.

We anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and earnest believers both at once.

I would know any man as a Christian, would rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would recognize as a Christian; and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in these old days recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what He was and of what He could do.

Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.

It is God's world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of God; given-may we not say?-just as a father gives a child a corner of his great garden, and says, "There, that is yours; now cultivate it."

So shall we join the disciples of our Lord, keeping faith in Him in spite of the crucifixion, and making ready, by our loyalty to Him in the days of His darkness, for the time when we shall enter into His triumph in the days of His light.

It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.

Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.

The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.

Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.

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."

The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.

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

The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man.

Death is strong, but Life is stronger.

Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.

If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold of God's willingness.

Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end.

The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God - and be content to have it so - that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life - and have really missed life itself.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.

The elements which determine the make of any particular sermon are three; the preacher, the material, and the audience; just as the character of any battle is determined by three elements; the gun (including the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress against which the attack is made.

Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.

O, do not pray for easy lives.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.

Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.

Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.

The place where two friends first met is sacred to them all through their friendship, all the more sacred as their friendship deepens and grows old.

The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that...we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.

Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants.

Anger is self-immolation.

He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and not set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into which his soul is invited.

Heaven is not to sweep our truths away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes till for the first time we shall really see them.

To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.

Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.

Newton's great generalization, which he called the "third law of motion," was that "Action and reaction are always equal to each other;" and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force;--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.