Thomas Brooks

[I]t is not hasty reading--but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee__ touching of the flower, which gathers honey--but her abiding for a time upon the flower, which draws out the sweet. It is not he who reads most--but he who meditates most, who will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.

Preach the gospel to yourself, because as you consider who you are in light of God's perfect goodness, holiness and peace, you must soften toward others.

Self is the only oil that makes the chariot-wheels of the hypocrite move in all religious concerns.

If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing a man you are, the more miserable a man you will be in the day of recompense; your light and knowledge will more torment you than all the devils in hell. Your knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash you, and that scorpion that will forever bite you, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw you; therefore read, and labor to know that you may do--or else you are undone forever.

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

Adversity hath slain her thousand, but prosperity her ten thousand.

#1. Spend more time considering evidences of grace in other Christians than you do pondering their sins and weaknesses. You, as a Christian, probably have a much greater ability to see weakness in other believers than to see strength. It is as if you use a magnifying glass when looking for weakness and a telescope when looking for grace. Brooks warns, "Sin is darkness, grace is light; sin is hell, grace is heaven; and what madness is it to look more at darkness than at light, more at hell than at heaven." Indeed.

Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.

The best course to prevent falling into the pit is to keep at the greatest distance from it; he who will be so bold as to attempt to dance upon the brink of the pit, may find by woeful experience that it is a righteous thing with God that he should fall into the pit.

It was a precept of Pythagoras, that when we enter into the temple to worship God , we must not so much as speak or think of any worldly business, lest we make God's service an idle ,perfunctory, and lazy recreation. The same I may say of closet prayer.

There are no souls in the world that are so fearful to judge others as those that do most judge themselves, nor so careful to make a righteous judgment of men or things as those that are most careful to judge themselves.

Humility can weep over other men's weaknesses, and joy and rejoice over their graces.

Humility makes a man richer than other men, and it makes a man judge himself the poorest among men.

There is no little sin, because no little God to sin against.