Phillips Brooks Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phillips Brooks
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can 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
Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.

Phillips Brooks
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.

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
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
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
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

Phillips Brooks