Phillips Brooks (1835–93) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, best celebrated as the lyricist to the Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Born in Boston and educated at Harvard University and the Virginia Theological Seminary, Brooks served as the Rector of Boston’s Trinity Church. He became one of the best-known and most charismatic preachers of his time. He described preaching as “the bringing of truth through personality,” by which he meant a kind of radiant optimism. Brooks was also briefly the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
Brooks helped design the Trinity Church building, “deservedly regarded as one of the finest buildings in America,” in Boston’s Back Bay. He also published a course of Lectures on Preaching at Yale’s theological school.
Brooks is remembered on January 23 in the Episcopal liturgical calendar.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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 no richer nor greater; nay, 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
Topics: Opportunity
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
—Phillips Brooks
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and pure and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Influence, Existence, Goodness
Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Abilities, Talents, Work
The only way to realize that we are God’s children is to let Christ lead us to our Father.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christian
Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Prophecy, Growth, Dreams, Vision, Success, Doing Your Best
While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child’s but a man’s religion—men’s forms of truth and men’s forms of experience.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Religion
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Character
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
Topics: Confidence
Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Wishes, Prayer
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
Topics: Sorrow
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christmas
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christmas
Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Truth
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
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Advice
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Praise
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
Topics: Greatness
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Decide, Act, Life, Character, Rest, Fail, Great
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to give healthy exercise to the charitable impulses.
—Phillips Brooks
There is not one life which the Life-giver ever loses out of His sight; not one which sins so that He casts it away; not one which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it touches Him with sorrow or with joy.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Life
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Happiness, Duty
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Benevolence, Kindness
Prayer is not conquering God’s reluctance, but taking hold of God’s willingness.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Prayer
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
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
Topics: Humility
The copy-books tell us that “to err is human.” That is wrong. To err is inhuman, to be holy is to live in the straight line of duty and of truth to God’s life in every intrinsic existence.
—Phillips Brooks
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Help, God, Cooperation, Greatness
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Assistance, Service, Aid, Help
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