Hugh B. Brown Quotes on Man (5 Quotes)

Some men fear death, and sometimes they feel that it is an awful enemy there are those who say they do not believe there is anything beyond the grave, that they think death ends conscious existence. I doubt very much if any man really believes that, as t.

We believe that all men are the spirit children of God, created in his image. This concept is supported by the Holy Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

In attempting to develop a life of prayer, one becomes conscious of the fact that he is two persons, and this is true of all of us. There is our outside self, the person who is seen and watched by others, who lives and speaks and acts in public, the person we reveal to others with varying degrees of frankness or affectation. And there is that other self - the inner self, which is ever partly hidden even from our closest friends, and which we, ourselves, but dimly apprehend. It is this self, our better self, that the Master sees and values. To him the door of this interior castle is always open. He sees the real person. He knows that the fiercest battles are fought in this 'Sector of the Soul,' and he whispers hope to all who have not surrendered there. . . . 'It was this understanding of the inner man which caused him to advise us to go alone into our closets and close the door when we would commune with the Father. Man, when alone with God, knows there can be no pretense, or make believe. Here at least he is absolutely honest. 'We feel the thing-we- ought-to-be beating beneath the thing-we-are.' Realizing that he knows before we tell him, we lay bare our souls to God. It is the antiseptic washing of the wound which makes healing possible, and in religion this is called repentance, and forgiveness. It is a time when our souls are naked and perhaps ashamed, but, when no longer distracted by fear of discovery, we can really concentrate on prayer. Rich and radiant living is generated in the hour of quiet meditation, of self-examination, of confession of weaknesses and prayer for forgiveness. This searching of our own souls and admitting what we see, is sometimes painful, but its effects are healing and wholesome. Probing a wound is sometimes more beneficial than applying an ointment.

A sense of relationship and copartnership with God involves the concept of universal brotherhood and that will help to develop intelligent tolerance, open-mindedness, and good-natured optimism. Life is really a battle between fear and faith, pessimism and optimism. Fear and pessimism paralyze men with skepticism and futility. One must have a sense of humor to be an optimist in times like these. And you young women will need a sense of humor if you marry these young men and try to live with them. Golden Kimball once said in a conference, 'The Lord Himself must like a joke or he wouldn't have made some of you people.' But your good humor must be real, not simulated. Let your smiles come from the heart and they will become contagious. You may see men on the street any day whose laugh is only a frozen grin with nothing in it but teeth. Men without humor tend to forget their source, lose sight of their goal, and with no lubrication in their mental crankshafts, they must drop out of the race. Lincoln said, 'Good humor is the oxygen of the soul.' And someone paraphrased, 'The surly bird catches the germ.'

Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two.