Top 100 Phillips Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

4. “The trouble is that I’m in a hurry, but God isn’t.”

— Phillips Brooks

5. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

6. “Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”

— Phillips Brooks

7. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

Featured in: Strong Quotes

8. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

9. “Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.”

— Phillips Brooks

10. “Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s Paradise.”

— Phillips Brooks

11. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

13. “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.””

— Phillips Brooks

14. “Pray for powers equal to your tasks.”

— Phillips Brooks

15. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

16. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

17. “Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door the dark night wakes – the glory breaks, Christmas comes once more.”

— Phillips Brooks

18. “Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.”

— Phillips Brooks

19. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

21. “The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

23. “Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

25. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

26. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

27. “The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young.”

— Phillips Brooks

29. “Preaching is truth through personality.”

— Phillips Brooks

30. “While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.”

— Phillips Brooks

31. “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?”

— Phillips Brooks

32. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

33. “Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.”

— Phillips Brooks

34. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

37. “Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now... Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.”

— Phillips Brooks

38. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

39. “It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. The only chance of any healthy life for it is to be as full a beech-tree as it can be.”

— Phillips Brooks

40. “Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.”

— Phillips Brooks

41. “Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.”

— Phillips Brooks

42. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

43. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

44. “Obedience completes itself in understanding.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

46. “Anger is self-immolation.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

48. “For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.”

— Phillips Brooks

49. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

50. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks