Phillips Brooks

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

The Truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.

If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.

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.

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.

Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.

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 not be a miracle, But you yourself shall be the miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself: At the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.