Top 100 Phillips Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “O, do not pray for easy lives...”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

53. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

57. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

58. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

59. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

60. “We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.”

— Phillips Brooks

61. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

62. “Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.”

— Phillips Brooks

63. “Christianity knows no truth which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

65. “Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.”

— Phillips Brooks

66. “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.””

— Phillips Brooks

67. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

68. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

69. “No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.”

— Phillips Brooks

70. “Death is strong, but Life is stronger...”

— Phillips Brooks

71. “It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.”

— Phillips Brooks

72. “Christ will rise on Easter day!”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

74. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

75. “Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God’s children.”

— Phillips Brooks

76. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

77. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

78. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

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

— Phillips Brooks

81. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

82. “The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.”

— Phillips Brooks

83. “Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ’s life and death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants.”

— Phillips Brooks

84. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

85. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

86. “Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.”

— Phillips Brooks

87. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

88. “Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.”

— Phillips Brooks

89. “The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.”

— Phillips Brooks

90. “Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself.”

— Phillips Brooks

91. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

92. “Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.”

— Phillips Brooks

93. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

94. “Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.”

— Phillips Brooks

95. “Joy in one’s work is the consummate tool.”

— Phillips Brooks

96. “The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.”

— Phillips Brooks

97. “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.”

— Phillips Brooks

98. “Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.”

— Phillips Brooks

99. “Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week.”

— Phillips Brooks

100. “If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to.”

— Phillips Brooks