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.

These words are Phillips Brooks's own, from his sermon "Going up to Jerusalem," printed in *Twenty Sermons* (1886), where the passage reads in full: "O, 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 a miracle." Brooks, the Boston clergyman best known for writing "O Little Town of Bethlehem," delivered it as a call to seek strength rather than ease, and the wording is stable across the printed editions of his sermons. President John F. Kennedy read the lines aloud and credited Brooks by name at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast on February 7, 1963, which fixed them firmly in the public record. The attribution is secure and rests on Brooks's own published text, so we record it as verified. A shortened modern paraphrase, "Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one," circulates widely under Bruce Lee's name, but that version has no source in Lee's own writing and traces back to this passage.