Quotes from Phillips Brooks

It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.

The man, who has begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more simply without.

The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.

No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.

The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.

The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.

Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.

A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

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.

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.

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.

Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.

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.

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.

Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.

Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.

O Risen Christ! O Easter Flower! How dear Thy Grace has grown! From east to west, with loving power, Make all the world Thine own.

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.

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