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
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: Character, Act, Rest, Fail, Life, Great, Decide
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 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
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: Strength, Prayer, Potential, Ability
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
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: Cooperation, Greatness & Great Things, Help, God, Greatness
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
—Phillips Brooks
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
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
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
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
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
Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Truth
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Worry
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: Living, Life, Doing Your Best
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
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: Patience, Forgiveness
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christmas
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
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 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 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: Aid, Assistance, Service, Help
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Duty, Happiness
Christianity helps us face the music even when we don’t like the tune.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christianity
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
Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: God
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sam Shoemaker American Clergyman
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
- Hosea Ballou American Theologian
- Thomas Merton American Trappist Monk
- William Laurence Sullivan American Priest
- James Freeman Clarke American 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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