Phillips Brooks Quotations | Page 2

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.

Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.

The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.

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

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.

To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.

No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

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.

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.

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

The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.

Death is strong, but Life is stronger ...

Anger is self-immolation.

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

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.

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.

Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.

It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Much as we deplore our condition in life, nothing would make us more satisfied with it than the changing of places, for a few days, with our neighbors.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings.

The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God - and be content to have it so - that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life - and have really missed life itself.

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.

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.

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

Obedience completes itself in understanding.

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

It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.

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.

Christ will rise on Easter day!

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.

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.