Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Prayer.
Mind how you pray. Make real business of it. Let it never be a dead formality. Some people pray a long time, but do not get what they are supposed to ask for, because they do not plead the promise in a truthful, business-like way. If you were to go into a bank, and stand an hour talking to the clerk, and then come out again without your cash, what would be the good of it? If I go to a bank, I pass my cheque across the counter, take up my money, and go about my business: that is the best way of praying. Ask for what you want, because the Lord has
C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon,
O brother, pray; in spite of Satan, pray; spend hours in prayer; rather neglect friends than not pray; rather fast, and lose breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper--and sleep too--than not pray. And we must not talk about prayer, we must pray in right earnest. The Lord is near. He comes softly while the virgin slumbers.
Andrew A. Bonar
O God, early in the morning I cry to you.Help me to pray and gather my thoughts to you, I cannot do it alone.In me it is dark, but with you there is light;I am lonely, but you do not desert me;My courage fails me, but with you there is help;I am restless, but with you there is peace;in me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;I do not understand your ways, but you know the way for me.Father in Heaven praise and thanks be to you for the night
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A prayer wr
Battering the gates of heaven with the storms of prayer.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.
Meister Eckhart
A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.
Alexander Cockburn
Never, never, never, never, never! Pray you, undo this button.
William Shakespeare
One reason why the Enemy found this so east was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake - and I still believe it to have been an honest mistake - in spiritual technique I had rendered my private practice of that religion a quiet intolerable burden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one's prayers but think abut what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's 'Law', Herbert's 'prattler') came into play. One had no sooner reached 'Amen' than it whispered, 'Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?'; then, more subtly, 'Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?' The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. 'Very well,' said the voice, 'hadn't you, then, better try it over again?' And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better...I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,' by which I meant a certain vivedness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value.
C.S. Lewis
I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for.
Angelina Grimke
When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.
Mahatma Gandhi
In moments of prayer, people tend to pose as a critic and point out percieved flaws in God's art.
Steve Maraboli
The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.
Brother Lawrence
As for meditation, I would like you to be a disciple of prayer, because without prayer there is no habitual union with God. You need a type of prayer which is suited to your temperament, your situation, your inner inclination, consequently, your heart. Speak simply and candidly to our Lord as with another self, as with your sister. Be a child who is full of love and surrendered to her good maker. Let it be an interior conversation with God more than a work of the mind. Then, a scattered, distracted meditation will come together, because it will express all the thoughts and needs of your heart.
Peter Julian Eymard, counseling
It is from prayer that the spirit's victory springs.
Schillerbuch
Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.
Frederick Buechner
The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Prayer is the voice of faith.
William Van Horne
Sweet souls around us watch us still, Press nearer to our side; Into our thoughts, into our prayers, With gentle helpings glide.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Religion is in the heart, not in the knees.
Douglas William Jerrold
To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.
Martin Luther
