Phillips Brooks
American Episcopal bishop and preacher, 1835-1893
36 quotes.
Quotes by Phillips Brooks
- A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words. Character is like bells which ring out sweet music, and which, when touched accidentally even, resound with sweet music.
- A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
- Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 the miracle.
- Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold of God's willingness.
- Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
- For 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.
- Greatness may be present in lives whose range is very small.
- Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
- I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
- If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything.
- If you are moved with a vague desire to help men be better men, you must know that you can do it not by belabouring the evil but by training the good that there is in them.
- 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 dawns upon you.
- Joy in one’s work is the consummate tool without which the work may be done indeed, but without which the work will always be done slowly, clumsily, and without its finest perfectness.
- Let us beware of losing our enthusiasms. Let us ever glory in something, and strive to retain our admiration for all that would ennoble, and our interest in all that would enrich and beautify our life.
- No man can live half a life when he has genuinely learned that it is only half a life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him.
- 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.
- No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being the better for it, without somebody 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.
- Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart.
- Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.
- Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold upon God's willingness.
- Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation.
- Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.
- The true way to be humble is not to stoop till you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that shall show you what the real smallness of your greatest 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.
- We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.
- Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
- Work touches the keys of endless activity, opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck before the immensity of what there is to do.
- You can help your fellow-men: you must help your fellow-men; but the only way you can help them is by being the noblest and the best man that it is possible for you to be.
- 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.
- Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely content with the life he is living when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger.