Quote

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

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There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.
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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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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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Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.
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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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No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind.
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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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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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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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To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple for it belongs not to this earth alone.
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The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.
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The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.
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While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.
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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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Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.
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Much as we deplore our condition in life, nothing would make us more satisfied with it than the changing of places, for a few days, with our neighbors.
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Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.
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So shall we join the disciples of our Lord, keeping faith in Him in spite of the crucifixion, and making ready, by our loyalty to Him in the days of His darkness, for the time when we shall enter into His triumph in the days of His light.
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Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.
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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.
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