Phillips Brooks
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Friday
No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.Collection: Christian
Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.Collection: Inspirational
Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.Collection: Comfort
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week.Collection: Fog
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."Collection: Christian
We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.Collection: Life
Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.Collection: Loyalty
Death is strong, but Life is stronger.Collection: Life
I would know any man as a Christian, would rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would recognize as a Christian; and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in these old days recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what He was and of what He could do.Collection: Christian
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.Collection: Fire
Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.Collection: Men
Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.Collection: Soul
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.Collection: Christmas
Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged.Collection: Shadow
Heaven is not to sweep our truths away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes till for the first time we shall really see them.Collection: Eye
The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.Collection: Secret
Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings.Collection: Prayer
Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.Collection: Heaven
He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and not set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into which his soul is invited.Collection: Mistake
To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Fall
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.Collection: Christmas
It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.Collection: Pride
No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.Collection: Life
Anger is self-immolation.Collection: Anger
Newton's great generalization, which he called the "third law of motion," was that "Action and reaction are always equal to each other;" and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force;--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Life
Pray for powers equal to your tasks.Collection: Prayer
O, do not pray for easy lives.Collection: Strength
Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.Collection: Use
The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that...we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.Collection: Easter
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left toCollection: Country
Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.Collection: Joy
To find his place and fill it is success for a man.Collection: Men
The glory of the star, the glory of the sun - we must not lose either in the other. We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth; we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven.Collection: Stars
To say 'well done'to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.Collection: Work
Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness.Collection: Talking
It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: God
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.Collection: Change
Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.Collection: Men
Let us beware of losing our enthusiasms. Let us ever glory in something, and strive to retain our admiration for all that would ennoble, and our interest in all that would enrich and beautify our life.Collection: Enthusiasm
There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.Collection: Hands
There are two ways of defending a castle; one by shutting yourself up in it, and guarding every loop-hole; the other by making it an open centre of operations from which all the surrounding country may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety?Collection: Country
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.Collection: Trust
Death is strong, but Life is stronger...Collection: Strong