Phillips Brooks
When you discover you've been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.Collection: Over You
The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.Collection: Friendship
While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Wall
Christ will rise on Easter day!Collection: Easter
The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteousness is thorough; it is the very spirit of unsparing truth.Collection: Spirit
Preaching is truth through personality.Collection: Personality
The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.Collection: Men
Christianity knows no truth which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.Collection: Love
Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.Collection: Character
The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.Collection: Men
Much as we deplore our condition in life, nothing would make us more satisfied with it than the changing of places, for a few days, with our neighbors.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Cheerful
Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer; Death is strong, but Life is stronger; Stronger than the dark, the light; Stronger than the wrong, the right; Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.Collection: Easter
Feed on Christ, and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.Collection: Fighting
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Christian
There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.Collection: Life
Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.Collection: Courage
There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.Collection: Achievement
Faith says not, 'I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent it,' but, 'God sent it, and so it must be good for me.' Faith, walking in the dark with God, only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely.Collection: Dark
The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will. Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Thinking
It is God's world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of God; given-may we not say?-just as a father gives a child a corner of his great garden, and says, "There, that is yours; now cultivate it."Collection: Children
We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.Collection: Friday
There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.Collection: Life
The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.Collection: Faith
The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.Collection: Men
How silently, how silently The wonderous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.Collection: Heart
The elements which determine the make of any particular sermon are three; the preacher, the material, and the audience; just as the character of any battle is determined by three elements; the gun (including the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress against which the attack is made.Collection: Character
Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.Collection: Mean
Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.Collection: Being Yourself
For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.Collection: Christmas
The man, who has begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more simply without.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Believe
The place where two friends first met is sacred to them all through their friendship, all the more sacred as their friendship deepens and grows old.Collection: Friends
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.Collection: Life
You may look through the streets of heaven, asking each how they came to b there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a person who is morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle.Collection: Strength
Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal.Collection: Scripture
The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man.Collection: Men
So shall we join the disciples of our Lord, keeping faith in Him in spite of the crucifixion, and making ready, by our loyalty to Him in the days of His darkness, for the time when we shall enter into His triumph in the days of His light.Collection: Loyalty
Those who help a child help humanity with an immediateness which no other help given to human creature in any other stage of human life can possibly give again.Collection: Children
We anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and earnest believers both at once.Collection: Love
Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall "be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God"; for that, and that alone, is peace.Collection: Beautiful
Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door the dark night wakes - the glory breaks, Christmas comes once more.Collection: Christmas
Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.Collection: Future
Obedience completes itself in understanding.Collection: Understanding