50 Thomas Brooks Quotes

The best way to do ourselves good is to be doing good to others; the best way to gather is to scatter.

The best and sweetest flowers of paradise God gives to His people when they are upon their knees. Prayer is the gate of heaven.

Where truth goes, I will go, and where truth is I will be, and nothing but death shall divide me and the truth.

Prayer crowns God with the honor and glory due to His name, and God crowns prayer with assurance and comfort. The most praying souls are the most assured souls.

Our sins are debts that none can pay but Christ. It is not our tears, but His blood; it is not our sighs, but His sufferings, that can testify for our sins. Christ must pay all, or we are prisoners forever.

Repentance is a grace, and must have its daily operation, as well as other graces. A true penitent must go on from faith to faith, from strength to strength; he must never stand still or turn back. True repentance is a continued spring, where the waters of godly sorrow are always flowing. 'My sin is ever before me'.

We trust as we love, and where we love. If we love Christ much, surely we shall trust him much.

Cold prayers shall never have any warm answers. God will suit His returns to our requests. Lifeless, services shall have lifeless answers. When men are dull, God will be dumb.

It is the very nature of grace to make a man strive to be most eminent in that particular grace which is most opposed to his bosom sin.

An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction.

Though there is nothing more dangerous, yet there is nothing more ordinary, than for weak saints to make their sense and feeling the judge of their condition. We must strive to walk by faith.

Nothing humbles and breaks the heart of a sinner like mercy and love. Souls that converse much with sin and wrath, may be much terrified; but souls that converse much with grace and mercy, will be much humbled.

The lives of ministers oftentimes convince more strongly than their words; their tongues may persuade, but their lives command.

Deliver me, O Lord, from that evil man, myself.

A man had need to fear this most of all that he fears not at all.

He that hath deserved hanging may be glad to escape with a whipping.

Let those be thy choicest companions who have made Christ their chief companion.

God hears no more than the heart speaks; and if the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf.

Christ is the sun, and all the watches of our lives should be set by the dial of his motion.

There is the seed of all sins - of the vilest and worst of sins - in the best of men.

Suffering times are sealing times. The primitive Christians found them so, and the suffering saints in Mary's days found them so. When the furnace is seven times hotter than ordinary, the Spirit of the Lord comes and seals up a man's pardon in his bosom, his peace with God, and his title to heaven. Blessed Bradford looked upon his sufferings as an evidence to him that he was on the right way to heaven.

Oh, is the Lord Jesus Christ a believer's life? Why, then, let no believer be disquieted, nor overwhelmed and dejected, for any loss or for any sorrow or suffering that he meets with for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake. Oh, what should a man then do for Jesus Christ, who is his life!

God sees us in secret, therefore, let us seek his face in secret. Though heaven be God's palace, yet it is not his prison.

Truth is mighty and will prevail.

Christ choosing solitude for private prayer, doth not only hint to us the danger of distraction and deviation of thoughts in prayer, but how necessary it is for us to choose the most convenient places we can for private prayer. Our own fickleness and Satan's restlessness call upon us to get into such places where we may freely pour out our soul into the bosom of God [Mark 1.35].

How many threadbare souls are to be found under silken cloaks and gowns!

Faith is the champion of grace, and love the nurse; but humility is the beauty of grace.

You had better be a poor man and a rich Christian, than a rich man and a poor Christian. You had better do anything, bear anything, and be anything rather than be a dwarf in grace.

God looks not at the oratory of your prayers, how elegant they may be; nor at the geometry of your prayers, how long they may be; nor at the arithmetic of your prayers, how many they may be; not at logic of your prayers, how methodical they may be; but the sincerity of them he looks at.

Look, as a painted man is no man, and as painted fire is no fire, so a cold prayer is no prayer.

Weak Christians are afraid of the shadow of the cross.

You may as soon fill a bag with wisdom, a chest with virtue, or a circle with a triangle, as the heart of man with anything here below. A man may have enough of the world to sink him, but he can never have enough to satisfy him.

There is no such way to attain to greater measures of grace, as for a man to live up to that little grace he has.

'My sin is ever before me' [Psalm 51.3]. A humble soul sees that he can stay no more from sin, than the heart can from panting, and the pulse from beating. He sees his heart and life to be fuller of sin, than the firmament is of stars; and this keeps him low. He sees that sin is so bred in the bone, that till his bones, as Joseph's, be carried out of the Egypt of this world, it will not out. Though sin and grace were never born together, and though they shall not die together, yet while the believer lives, these two must live together; and this keeps him humble.

He who stands upon his own strength will never stand.

Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.

Prayer is nothing but the breathing that out before the Lord, that was first breathed into us by the Spirit of the Lord.

A good conscience and a good confidence go together.

As heat is opposed to cold, and light to darkness, so grace is opposed to sin. Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.

It is better to have a sore than a seared conscience.

The two poles could sooner meet, than the love of Christ and the love of the world.

Much faith will yield unto us here our heaven, but any faith, if true, will yield us heaven hereafter.

Afflictions are but as a dark entry into our Father's house.

The only way to avoid cannon-shot is to fall down. No such way to be freed from temptation as to keep low.

When you have overcome one temptation, you must be ready to enter the lists with another. As distrust, in some sense, is the mother of safety, so security is the gate of danger.

It is not he who knows most, nor he who hears most, nor yet he who talks most, but he who exercises grace most, who has most communion with God.

Those years, months, weeks, days, and hours, that are not filled up with God, with Christ, with grace, and with duty, will certainly be filled up with vanity and folly. The neglect of one day, of one duty, of one hour, would undo us, if we had not an Advocate with the Father.

Secret sins commonly lie nearest the heart.

God's hearing of our prayers doth not depend upon sanctification, but upon Christ's intercession; not upon what we are in ourselves, but what' we are in the Lord Jesus; both our persons and our prayers are acceptable in the beloved [Eph 1.6].

A man's most glorious actions will at last be found to be but glorious sins, if he hath made himself, and not the glory of God, the end of those actions.