#1. Spend more time considering evidences of grace in other Christians than you do ponder 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.

— Thomas Brooks

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

— Thomas Brooks

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

— Thomas Brooks

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

— Thomas Brooks

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.

— 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’s 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.

— Thomas Brooks

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.

— Thomas Brooks

Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.

— Thomas Brooks

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.

— Thomas Brooks

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

— Thomas Brooks