Top 100 Phillips Brooks Quotes
#1. The essential tendency of life is toward happiness ... Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.
Phillips Brooks
#2. No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.
Phillips Brooks
#4. Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.
Phillips Brooks
#5. 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 the miracle.
Phillips Brooks
#6. We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.
Phillips Brooks
#7. Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks
#8. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#9. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#10. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#12. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#13. The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.
Phillips Brooks
#14. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
Phillips Brooks
#15. The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
Phillips Brooks
#16. I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
Phillips Brooks
#17. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#19. There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.
Phillips Brooks
#20. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#21. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#22. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#23. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#24. Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.
Phillips Brooks
#25. It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
Phillips Brooks
#26. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#27. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#28. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#29. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#30. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#31. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#33. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#34. It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. The only chance of any healthy life for it is to be as full a beech-tree as it can be.
Phillips Brooks
#35. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#36. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#37. Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.
Phillips Brooks
#38. Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.
Phillips Brooks
#39. Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door the dark night wakes - the glory breaks, Christmas comes once more.
Phillips Brooks
#40. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#41. The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.
Phillips Brooks
#42. Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
Phillips Brooks
#43. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#44. Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.
Phillips Brooks
#45. The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.
Phillips Brooks
#46. There is one universal religion, Helen - the religion of Love. Love your Heavenly Father with your whole heart and soul, love every child of God as much as ever you can, and remember that the possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil; and you have the key to Heaven.
Phillips Brooks
#47. Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.
Phillips Brooks
#48. Up and down our lives obedient
Walk, dear Christ, with footsteps radiant,
Till those garden lives shall be
Fair with duties done for Thee;
And our thankful spirits say,
"Christ arose on Easter Day."
Phillips Brooks
#50. 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.'
Phillips Brooks
#51. Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
Phillips Brooks
#52. There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow merely thankful for belief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with, and trust in, Him who has released us.
Phillips Brooks
#53. The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.
Phillips Brooks
#55. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#56. For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.
Phillips Brooks
#57. Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.
Phillips Brooks
#58. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#59. Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
Phillips Brooks
#60. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#61. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#63. Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.
Phillips Brooks
#64. It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.
Phillips Brooks
#65. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#66. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#67. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#68. If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
Phillips Brooks
#69. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#70. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#71. Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
Phillips Brooks
#72. 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?
Phillips Brooks
#73. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#74. Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.
Phillips Brooks
#75. Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.
Phillips Brooks
#76. It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.
Phillips Brooks
#77. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#79. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#80. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#81. Let us beware of losing our enthusiasms. Let us ever glory in something, and strive to retain our admiration for all that would ennoble, and our interest in all that would enrich and beautify our life.
Phillips Brooks
#82. Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.
Phillips Brooks
#83. If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to
Phillips Brooks
#84. Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.
Phillips Brooks
#85. O Risen Christ! O Easter Flower!
How dear Thy Grace has grown!
From east to west, with loving power,
Make all the world Thine own.
Phillips Brooks
#86. Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings.
Phillips Brooks
#87. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#88. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Phillips Brooks
#89. Christianity knows no truth which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
Phillips Brooks
#90. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#91. Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself.
Phillips Brooks
#92. Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week.
Phillips Brooks
#93. Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.
Phillips Brooks
#94. The more man becomes irradiated with the Divinity of Christ, the more, not the less, truly he is man.
Phillips Brooks
#95. Much as we deplore our condition in life, nothing would make us more satisfied with it than the changing of places, for a few days, with our neighbors.
Phillips Brooks
#96. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#97. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#98. Truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks.
Phillips Brooks
#99. 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.
Phillips Brooks
#100. Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
Phillips Brooks
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top