Phillips Brooks Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King,
And peace to men on earth.

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

Phillips Brooks
For 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
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
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 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
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 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.

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

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

Phillips Brooks
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for power equal to your tasks.

Phillips Brooks
O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by; Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.

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

Phillips Brooks
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
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
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
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