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It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.

Phillips Brooks

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Phillips Brooks
Age: 57 †
Born: 1835
Born: December 13
Died: 1893
Died: January 23
Clergyman
Hymnwriter
Priest
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Life
Copies
Refuse
Pride
Healthy
Beech
Tree
Oaks
Full
Refuses
Chance
Copy
Self
Limitations

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Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
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If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
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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.
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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.
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The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.
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Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.
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The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that...we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.
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Feed on Christ, and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.
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The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.
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A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
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Christ will rise on Easter day!
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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.
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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.
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Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.
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There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.
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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.
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Faith says not, 'I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent it,' but, 'God sent it, and so it must be good for me.' Faith, walking in the dark with God, only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely.
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Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
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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.
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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