Phillips Brooks (1835–93) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, best celebrated as the lyricist to the Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Born in Boston and educated at Harvard University and the Virginia Theological Seminary, Brooks served as the Rector of Boston’s Trinity Church. He became one of the best-known and most charismatic preachers of his time. He described preaching as “the bringing of truth through personality,” by which he meant a kind of radiant optimism. Brooks was also briefly the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
Brooks helped design the Trinity Church building, “deservedly regarded as one of the finest buildings in America,” in Boston’s Back Bay. He also published a course of Lectures on Preaching at Yale’s theological school.
Brooks is remembered on January 23 in the Episcopal liturgical calendar.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Phillips Brooks
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.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Strength, Prayer, Potential, Ability
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Charity
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
Topics: Doing Your Best, Living, Life
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Worry
The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Humility
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
Topics: Future, The Present
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and pure and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Goodness, Existence
Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours. Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Patience, Forgiveness
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