Phillips Brooks Quotes

What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does.

If all you're doing is making money, you have a luxurious but empty life.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

The word contentment comes from the word content, which is what we hold inside - love, value, a feeling of a life that has meaning or purpose, a cause greater than yourself that you're a part of. These are the things that bring true happiness. As a culture, I think we need to redefine what it means to be happy.

Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.

People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

So you know how things stand. Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don't let anything distract you. You've wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.

I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that it’s not where they’re gonna find their sense of completion. Like many of you, I was concerned about going out into the world and doing something bigger than myself, until someone smarter than myself made me realize that there is nothing bigger than myself. My soul is not contained within the limits of my body, my body is contained within the limitlessness of my soul.

You may have occasion to possess or use material things, but the secret of life lies in never missing them.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.

There are so many lies out there about what the good life is whether that's making as much money as you can or just being the best you can be. I just want to challenge those lies and look at what God says the good life is in His Word. He says that the good life is about believing in God and embracing everything that He has for us.

Life will only make sense; and can only produce long-term happiness, peace and joy when embraced from the perspective of the soul.

God showed me that He could and would replace everything that was missing in my life, but that nothing could replace Him in my life.

In a dream I walked with God through the deep places of creation; past walls that receded and gates that opened through hall after hall of silence, darkness and refreshment--the dwelling place of souls acquainted with light and warmth--until, around me, was an infinity into which we all flowed together and lived anew, like the rings made by raindrops falling upon wide expanses of calm dark waters.

She lived, we'll say, A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)

And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!

It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'