Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Prayer.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Dag Hammarskjold
Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.
George Eliot
Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire
Prayer is not a substitute for work, thinking, watching, suffering, or giving; prayer is a support for all other efforts.
George Buttrick
To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God. As soon as we begin to divide our thoughts about God and thoughts about people and events, we remove God from our daily life and put him into a pious little niche where we can think pious thoughts and experience pious feelings. ... Although it is important and even indispensable for the spiritual life to set apart time for God and God alone, prayer can only become unceasing prayer when all our thoughts -- beautiful or ugly, high or low, proud or shameful, sorrowful or joyful -- can be thought in the presence of God. ... Thus, converting our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer moves us from a self-centred monologue to a God-centred dialogue.
Henri Nouwen, Clowning in Rome
Prayer is first of all listening to God. It's openness. God is always speaking; he's always doing something. Prayer is to enter into that activity. ... Convert your thoughts into prayer. As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer. The difference is not that prayer is thinking about other things, but that prayer is thinking in dialogue, ... a conversation with God.
Henri Nouwen
Praying is no easy matter. It demands a relationship in which you allow someone other than yourself to enter into the very center of your person, to see there what you would rather leave in darkness, and to touch there what you would rather leave untouched.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.
W. H. Auden
Prayer is less about changing the world than it is about changing ourselves.
David J. Wolpe
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Doris Lessing
No one can believe how powerful prayer is and what it can effect, except those who have learned it by experience. Whenever I have prayed earnestly, I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes.
Short prayers reach heaven.
Proverb
No one can pray well, but those who live well.
One hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy years of prayer.
...And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once from his being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but--what shall I call Him? the Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge the performance? The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awaken the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.
C.S. Lewis
A police force, wherever they are, is made up of amazing people, and I respect them a great deal.
Nancy McKeon
You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.
