Phillips Brooks Quotations

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

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

Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours. Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.

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.

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

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

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."

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

No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.

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.

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

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.

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.

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.

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.

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.

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

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

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.

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

Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.

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

Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very stange 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.

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...

Sad is the day for any man when he becomes absolutely satisfied with the life he is living, the thoughts that he is thinking and the deeds that he is doing; when there ceases to be forever beating at the doors of his soul a desire to do something lar

In him was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness

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

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.

You who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him someday

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will. Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.

Character - Some day, 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.

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.

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."

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

Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

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.

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

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.

0 little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by.

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

Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal.

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.

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

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

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.

The more man becomes irradiated with the Divinity of Christ, the more, not the less, truly he is man.

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

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

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young....

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

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.‎

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.

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

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?

Preaching is truth through personality.

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.

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

The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.

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.

O, do not pray for easy lives...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.