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The collection / 53 fragments

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10c. 1864 AD
The 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
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11c. 1864 AD
Do 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
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12c. 1864 AD
You 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
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13c. 1864 AD
It 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
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14c. 1864 AD
How 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
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19c. 1864 AD
If 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
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