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: Future, The Present
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Character
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
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Life
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, Aid, Help, Assistance
Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Prayer, Wishes
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
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Duty, Happiness
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
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
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it … you cannot do everything.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
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
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
Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Work, Abilities, Talents
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
Christianity helps us face the music even when we don’t like the tune.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christianity
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, Success, Growth, Dreams, Vision, Doing Your Best
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
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
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: Goodness, Influence, Existence
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Life, Living, Doing Your Best
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Genius
The only way to realize that we are God’s children is to let Christ lead us to our Father.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christian
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, Ability, Potential, Strength
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
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: Opinion, Opinions
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
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Worry
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Charity
Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Truth
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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