Quotes from Phillips Brooks

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

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.

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.

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.

Prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned God-ward.

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

Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.

The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.

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

Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.

Distrust your religion unless it is cheerful, unless it turns every act and deed to music and exults in attempts to catch the harmony of the new life.

Death is strong, but Life is stronger.

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.

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

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.

O, do not pray for easy lives.

To find his place and fill it is success for a man.

When you discover you've been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.

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.

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.

Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.

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.'

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.

There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow thankful for relief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with and trust in Him who has released us.