Phillips Brooks Quotes

Phillips Brooks offers gentle, reflective thoughts on life, character, and humility.

27 quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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

5. 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.

6. No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

7. Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.

8. Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.

9. How prudenty most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

10. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

11. Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.

12. Preaching is truth through personality.

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

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

15. 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.

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

17. 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.

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

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

20. To find his place and fill it is success for a man.

21. 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."

22. Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold of God's willingness.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.