Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Charity
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Character
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
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Forgiveness, Patience
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
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Example
Prayer is not conquering God’s reluctance, but taking hold of God’s willingness.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Prayer
Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Work, Abilities, Talents
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: Service, Help, Aid, Assistance
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it … you cannot do everything.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
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
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Duty, Happiness
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: God, Greatness & Great Things, Cooperation, Greatness, Help
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Genius
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Prayer, Strength, Potential, Ability
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
Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: God
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: The Present, Future
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
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
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
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: Existence, Influence, Goodness
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Worry
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christmas
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 only way to realize that we are God’s children is to let Christ lead us to our Father.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christian
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
Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Wishes, Prayer
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: Kindness, Benevolence
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sam Shoemaker American Episcopal Priest
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
- Hosea Ballou American Theologian
- Thomas Merton American Trappist Monk
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- James Freeman Clarke American Unitarian Clergyman
- Edward McKendree Bounds American Methodist Clergyman
- Frederick Buechner American Writer, Theologian
- Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
- Henry Ward Beecher American Protestant Clergyman
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