Phillips Brooks Quotes

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.

There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow thankful for relief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with and trust in Him who has released us.

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.

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

Death is strong, but Life is stronger.

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.‎

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.

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.

While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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

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.

No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.

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.

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.

Christ will rise on Easter day!

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

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

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.

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.

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

Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.

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

To find his place and fill it is success for a man.

Christianity knows no truth which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.

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.

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.

Preaching is truth through personality.

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.

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

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

Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.

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