Phillips Brooks Quotes

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.

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

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.

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.

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 the child of God.

The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.

Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.

Character - Some day, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.

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.

I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.

Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.

The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.

It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.

Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.

Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.

Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.

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.