Phillips Brooks
From Wikiquote
Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893), was a noted United States clergyman and author, who briefly served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s.
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- O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.- O little Town of Bethlehem (1868), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
- For 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.
- Sermons (1879), p. 14.
- O, 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 to you by the grace of God.
- "Going up to Jerusalem", Sermons (1886), p. 330.
- Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
- Literature and Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
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- 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.
- No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
- Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.
- 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, in these quiet weeks. 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.
[edit] Misattributed
- How prudenty most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
- Actually said by Wendell Phillips, on the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, which occurred on November 7, 1837.
