Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), the influential Episcopal preacher and longtime rector of Trinity Church in Boston, was known for sermons that joined personal piety to social responsibility. The saying “Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there” is commonly attributed to him in later quotation collections as a corrective to the older proverb “Charity begins at home.” In the late 19th-century American Protestant milieu in which Brooks preached, churches were increasingly engaged with urban poverty, missions, and organized philanthropy; the aphorism fits Brooks’s characteristic emphasis that moral and religious life must radiate outward from private virtue into public action.

The line argues for a two-step ethic: care and responsibility are first learned and practiced in one’s immediate circle (“at home”), but genuine charity cannot be confined to family or local loyalties. Brooks reframes a potentially parochial maxim into an expansive moral principle, insisting that compassion should extend beyond kinship, class, or nation. The quote also implies that domestic virtue is not an excuse for indifference; rather, the household is a training ground for wider solidarity. Its enduring appeal lies in balancing rooted obligations with universal concern, a tension central to both religious ethics and civic philanthropy.