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The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

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
Happiness
Optimism
True
Tendencies
Men
Reasonable
Life
Condition
Essential
Essentials
Toward
Conditions
Tendency

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Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
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There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
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Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
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I would know any man as a Christian, would rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would recognize as a Christian and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in these old days recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what He was and of what He could do.
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The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.
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The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteousness is thorough it is the very spirit of unsparing truth.
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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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Newton's great generalization, which he called the third law of motion, was that Action and reaction are always equal to each other and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.
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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.
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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.
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Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal.
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A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
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Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.
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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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It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
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Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.
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The place where two friends first met is sacred to them all through their friendship, all the more sacred as their friendship deepens and grows old.
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There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.
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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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