PRAYER QUOTES
quotations about prayer
The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.
STAN LEE
The Avengers, #14
If God doesn't want something for me, I shouldn't want it either. Spending time in meditative prayer, getting to know God, helps align my desires with God's.
PHILIP YANCEY
Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
Prayer is to our relationship with our Divine Source what conversation is to our most intimate human relationships. Like water for a plant, it's a condition for growth.
DANIEL MURPHY
"Mochas, Midrash, and Mysteries: Prayer is conversation", Daily Tidings, May 4, 2016
Similar to prayer, I'm reminded of the fire axes that are mounted in glass cases and reserved for emergency use only. Sadly, we often forget what a great price God has paid in order that we might have the privilege and opportunity to communicate with Him. It's been said that prayer is the least we can do and yet the most we can do.
BILLY HOLLAND
"Prayer is the least and the most we can do", Greene County Daily World, March 27, 2018
Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Friends Journal, January 30, 2013
I strain toward God; God strains toward me. I ache for God; God aches for me. Prayer is mutual yearning, mutual straining, mutual aching.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
A Tree Full of Angels
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Prayer is the present remedy for the souls of them that are sick.
THOMAS BECON
The Early Works of Thomas Becon
In search of what prayer is, some have defined it as speaking, communicating, questioning, listening, waiting, sharing and expressing our need to God. Prayer can be all of the above and much more. In short, prayer is the spoken or unspoken desire, the desperate longing, the hunger of our innermost search for God's attention, intervention, will and divine action to meet our needs. It is the hidden treasure of our innermost being--to meet with God.
SAMUEL O. ENYIA
Prayer: God and You Alone
If we with earnest effort could succeed
To make our life one long connected prayer,
As lives of some perhaps have been and are,
If never leaving Thee, we had no need
Our wandering spirits back again to lead
Into thy presence, but continued there,
Like angels standing on the highest stair
Of the sapphire throne, this were to pray indeed.
But if distractions manifold prevail,
And if in this we must confess we fail,
Grant us to keep at least a prompt desire,
Continual readiness for prayer and praise,
An altar heaped and waiting to take fire
With the least spark, and leap into a blaze.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Sonnet"
Souls without prayer are like bodies, palsied and lame, having hands and feet they cannot use.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
PHILIP YANCEY
Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
The Ages of Prayer are the Dark Ages of the world. When learning was crushed out, and superstition was rampant, when wisdom was called witchcraft, and priests ruled Europe, then Prayer was always rising up to God from the countless monasteries where men dwarfed themselves into monks, and from the convents where women shriveled up into nuns. The sound of the bell that called to Prayer was never silent, and the time that was needed for work was wasted in Prayer, and in the straining to serve God the service of man was neglected and despised.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
God chooses to do His will according to His own time. He does not depend on our time. Our time is chronological and linear but God's time is timeless. He will act at the fullness of His time. Our prayer and urging may not necessarily rush God into action, but our prayer places us before Him in fellowship.
SAMUEL O. ENYIA
Prayer: God and You Alone
Jesus reminds us that prayer is a little like children coming to their parents. Our children come to us with the craziest requests at times! Often we are grieved by the meanness and selfishness in their requests, but we would be all the more grieved if they never came to us even with their meanness and selfishness. We are simply glad that they do come--mixed motives and all.
RICHARD J. FOSTER
Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home
No earthly authority can separate us from direct access to our Creator. There can never be a mechanical or electronic failure when we pray. There is no limit on the number of times or how long we can pray each day. There is no quota of how many needs we wish to pray for in each prayer. We do not need to go through secretaries or make an appointment to reach the throne of grace. He is reachable at any time and any place.
JAMES E. FAUST
"The Lifeline of Prayer", April 2002
Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God; it is a sincere seeking for a good thing; and it is a concentration on the thing sought, with faith that it is obtainable.
PEACE PILGRIM
Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words
Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers; it is the only prayer that deserves an answer -- good, honest, noble work.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
appeal to the jury in the trial of C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy, May 1887
There are people who do not find it necessary to use words or ideas for meditation. We know that we can hear a song, sung in a language of which we know not one word, but of the rhythm, the melody of it finds an answer in our heart, it echoes from our own soul. We can understand it without being able to translate a word of it into our own speech. For some, prayer is like that. The muted music of the human, suffering Christ touches a responsive chord in their own being. They do not require words and images, and indeed cannot use them. They cannot explain. They have no words, even for Christ. Perhaps they do not understand the music themselves. Perhaps if they uttered it aloud it would only confuse the world. It would not sound in their voice as it sounds in their souls.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER
This War is the Passion
Dear Jesus, do something.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pale Fire