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 the miracle.

—Phillips Brooks

About Phillips Brooks

Portrait of Phillips Brooks

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the rector of Boston's Trinity Church and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts. One of the most popular preachers of the Gilded Age, he worked to make the Christian Church more relevant to contemporaries. Among...

More quotations from Phillips Brooks

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

—Phillips Brooks

Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.

—Phillips Brooks

In the best sense of the word [Jesus] was a radical.… His religion has so long been identified with conservatism—often with conservatism of the obstinate and unyielding sort—that it is almost startling for us sometimes to remember that all the conservatism of His own times was against Him, that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to Him.

—Phillips Brooks

More quotations tagged with “prayer”

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice.

—Meister Eckhart

The time to pray is not when we are in a tight spot but just as soon as we get out of it.

—Josh Billings

Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.

One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer.

—G. E. Lessing

You must pray that the way be long, full of adventures and experiences.

—Constantine Peter Cavafy

History

11 Jul 2015 Added