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

More quotes by Phillips Brooks

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The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.
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Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.
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Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
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Anger is self-immolation.
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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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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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A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
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Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
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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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For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all No palace too great, no cottage too small.
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Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.
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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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The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.
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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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It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
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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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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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Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.
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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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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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