Phillips Brooks Quotes & Sayings

Obedience completes itself in understanding. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

Joy in one's work is the consummate tool. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ will rise on Easter day! — Phillips Brooks

Death is strong, but Life is stronger ... — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings. — Phillips Brooks

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. 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 a child of God. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

Happiness is the natural flower of duty. — Phillips Brooks

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." — Phillips Brooks

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

Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

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

The essential tendency of life is toward happiness ... Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

Preaching is truth through personality. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

Pray for powers equal to your tasks. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

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

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

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

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

The glory of the star, the glory of the sun - we must not lose either in the other. We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth; we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven. — Phillips Brooks

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. — Phillips Brooks

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

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. — Phillips Brooks

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. — Phillips Brooks

Anger is self-immolation. — Phillips Brooks

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