01c. 1864 ADWe are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
02c. 1864 ADIt seems as if heroes had done almost all for the world that they can do; and not much more can come until common men awake and take their common tasks. I believe the common man’s task is the hardest.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
03c. 1864 ADYou picture to yourself the beauty of bravery and steadfastness. And then some little, wretched, disagreeable duty comes which is your martyrdom, the lamp for your oil; and if you do not do it, your oil is spilled.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
04c. 1864 ADIt seems to me there is no maxim for a noble life like this: Count always your highest moments your truest moments. Believe that in the time when you were the greatest and most spiritual man, then you were your truest self.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
05c. 1864 ADGod says, live deeply, earnestly in the present, and the spirit of all the ages shall come and reveal itself to you.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
06c. 1864 ADOh, 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! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
07c. 1864 ADThe old year is fast slipping back behind us. We cannot stay it if we would. We must go on and leave our past. Let us go forth nobly. Let us go as those whom greater thoughts and greater deeds await beyond.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
08c. 1864 ADHe who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties That he has never used: And thought with him Is in its infancy.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
09c. 1864 ADLift up yourselves to the great meaning of the day, and dare to think of your humanity as something so divinely precious that it is worthy of being an offering to God. Count it a privilege to make that offering as complete as possible, keeping nothing back, and then go out to the pleasures and duties of your life, having been born anew into His divinity, as He was born into our humanity on Christmas Day.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
10c. 1864 ADThe power of mere activity is often overrated. It is not what the best men do, but what they are, that constitutes their truest benefaction to their fellowmen. The things that men do get their value, after all, from the way in which they are able to show the existence of character which can comfort and help mankind.... It is the lives, like the stars, which simply pour down on us the calm light of their bright and faithful being, up to which we look and out of which we gather the deepest calm and courage.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
11c. 1864 ADDo not dare to be so absorbed in your own life, so wrapped up in listening to the sound of your own hurrying wheels, that all this vast pathetic music, made up of the mingled joy and sorrow of your fellowmen, shall not find out your heart and claim it and make you rejoice to give yourself for them.... Be sure that ambition and charity will both grow mean unless they are both inspired and exalted by religion. Energy, love, and faith,—these make the perfect man.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
12c. 1864 ADYou are in God's world; you are God's child. Those things you cannot change; the only peace and rest and happiness for you is to accept them and rejoice in them. When God speaks to you, you must not believe that it is the wind blowing or the torrent falling from the hill. You must know that it is God. You must gather up the whole power of meeting Him. You must be thankful that life is great and not little. You must listen as if listening were your life. And then, then only can come peace. All other sounds will be caught up into the prevailing richness of that voice of God. The lost proportions will be perfectly restored. Discord will cease; harmony will be complete.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
13c. 1864 ADIt may be truly said that no man does any work perfectly who does not enjoy his work. Joy in one's work is the consummate tool without which the work may be done indeed, but without its finest perfectness. Men who do their work without enjoying it are like men carving statues with hatchets. A man who does his work with thorough enjoyment of it is like an artist who holds an exquisite tool which is almost as obedient to him as his own hand, and almost works intelligently with him.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
14c. 1864 ADHow large a part of our Godward life is travelled, not by clear landmarks seen far off in the promised land, but as travellers climb a mountain peak, by putting footstep after footstep, slowly and patiently, into the prints which someone going before us, with keener sight, with stronger nerves, tied to us by the cord of saintly sympathy, has planted deep into the pathless snow of the bleak distance that stretches up between humanity and God.... So we ascend by one another. We live by one another's blessings.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
15c. 1864 ADDo 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. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
16c. 1864 ADThere are saints enough if we only know how to find them—sainthoods of the fireside and of the market place. They wear no glory round their heads; they do their duties in the strength of God; they have their martyrdoms and win their palms, and though they get into no calendars, they leave a benediction and a force behind them on the earth when they go up to heaven.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
17c. 1864 ADThere are those who want to get away from all their past; who if they could, would fain begin all over again. Their life seems one long failure. But you must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to get a future out of it.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
18c. 1864 ADI do believe the common man's task is the hardest. The hero has the hero's aspiration that lifts him to his labor. All great duties are easier than the little ones, though they cost far more blood and agony.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
19c. 1864 ADIf you really want to help your fellowmen, you must not merely have in you what would do them good if they should take it from you, but you must be such a man that they can take it from you. The snow must melt upon the mountain and come down in a spring torrent, before its richness can make the valley rich. And yet in every age there are cold, hard, unsympathetic wise men standing up aloof, like snow banks on the hill tops, conscious of the locked up fertility in them and wondering that their wisdom does not save the world.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
20c. 1864 ADThat ever-vivid scene of Bethlehem.... A father, a mother, and a child are there. No religion which began like that could ever lose its character. The first unit of human life, the soul, is there, in the new-born personality of the childhood. But the second unit of human life, the family, is just as truly there in the familiar relation of husband and wife and the sacred, eternal mystery of motherhood.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
21c. 1864 ADDo 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.Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
22c. 1864 ADPray 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 / quote ↗
23c. 1864 ADDo 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! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.Phillips Brooks / quote ↗
24c. 1864 ADIf 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 / quote ↗
