Phillips Brooks
Birthdate: December 13, 1835
Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Date of Death: January 23, 1893
Occupation: Author and Clergyman
Profile: Best known for being the lyricist of
O Little Town of Bethlehem
.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Brooks
Number of Quotes: 93
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.
"O Little Town of Bethlehem"
Anger is self-immolation.
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it... you cannot do everything.
Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.
Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.
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.
Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.
Beware of the tendency to preach about Christianity, and try to
preach Christ.
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the
revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end.
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion.
Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament... it is in the Word, which Jesus is.
Christ will rise on Easter day!
Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.
Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.
Death is strong, but Life is stronger.
Distrust your religion unless it is cheerful, unless it turns every act and deed to music.
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!
Arguably his most famous quote.
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.
Everyone has an image of God distorted in some way...
Faith is not an insurance policy.
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.
For greatness after all... appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives.
Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit.
Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.
Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
He who helps a child helps humanity with an immediateness...
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
I do not see how we can help thinking about God when He is so good to us all the time.
If man is man and God is
God, to live without prayer
is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.
It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
It is God's world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust.
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.
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.
Jesus Christ,
the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation
of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely,
Christ is risen,
but I shall rise.
Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.
Love deems this world worth rescuing.
Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God,
and you will keep it to the end.
Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith... to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants.
No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried.
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt that his life belongs to his race, and that
which God gives to
him, He gives him for mankind.
No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for
it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
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.
No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and
what God has given them he gives it for mankind.
Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.
O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie!
O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men!
Obedience completes itself in understanding.
Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God,
in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger.
Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance,
but taking hold of God's willingness.
Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.
Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace.
Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing — where there is
not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do.
Often quoted as Bad will be the day...
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty
Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.
Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.
Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man
The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's
relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.
The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope...
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.
The feet of the humblest may walk in the field Where the feet of the Holiest trod, This, then, is the marvel to mortals revealed.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity.
The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to
know God.
The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.
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.
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.
The world has grown weary through the years, but at Christmas, it is young.
There are no times in life when opportunity gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer.
There are two ways of defending a castle; one by shutting yourself up in it...
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.
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.
Truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks.
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.
We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.
We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are.
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.
Whatever makes us feel superior to other people... that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.
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.
Last on Earth
