Phillips Brooks Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

O, do not pray for easy lives.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteousness is thorough; it is the very spirit of unsparing truth.

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

Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.

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

Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.

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

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.

Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There are two ways of defending a castle; one by shutting yourself up in it, and guarding every loop-hole; the other by making it an open centre of operations from which all the surrounding country may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety?

Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged.

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.

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.

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.

Anger is self-immolation.

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

It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.

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 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.

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.

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

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.