Phillips Brooks Quotes

Men and women grow older in this world of ours, and as the years advance they change. Of all the changes that they undergo those of their moral natures are the most painful to watch. The boy changes into the man, and there is something lost which never seems to come back again. It is like the first glow of the morning that passes away — like the bloom on the blossom that never is restored. Your grown-up boy is wise in bad things which he used to know nothing about. His life no longer sounds with a perfectly clear ring, or shines with a perfectly white lustre. He is no longer unspotted.

There is one universal religion, Helen - the religion of Love. Love your Heavenly Father with your whole heart and soul, love every child of God as much as ever you can, and remember that the possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil; and you have the key to Heaven.

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are.

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.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure, and good without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

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.

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.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

O morning stars, together Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King, And peace to men on earth.

"If you hold a rose up before a man and he shuts his eyes tight and just holds out his hands and says "Here, I am ready to be persuaded; convince me by touch that your rose is red;" then you are helpless."

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.

Beware of the tendency to preach about Christianity, and try to preach Christ.

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

The danger facing all of us — let me say it again, for one feels it tremendously — is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel that life has no meaning at all — not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God — and be content to have it so — that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life — and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one's friends may be spared — satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle and thrill which come from a friendship with the Father.