PRAYER QUOTES
quotations about prayer
|
|
- God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
- And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
- A gauntlet with a gift in 't.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Aurora Leigh
As men's prayers are a disease of the will so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
Souls without prayer are like bodies, palsied and lame, having hands and feet they cannot use.
TERESA OF AVILA, The Interior Castle
When the gods would make us mad, they answer our prayers.
DAVID MAMET, Speed-the-Plow
- My God, is any hour so sweet
- From blush of morn to evening star,
- As that which calls me to Thy feet
- The hour of prayer?
CHARLOTTE ELLIOTT, My God, Is Any Hour So Sweet
In our search for the holy, there are times when our restless preparations smother the very truth for which are searching. We decorate our rooms and make elaborate preparations for our prayer, when a single flower and a moment of waiting are all we need to meed the One Who Comes.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR, Seasons of Your Heart
The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls.
MOTHER TERESA, A Gift for God
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is "thank you," it will be enough.
MEISTER ECKHART, Woman's Day Magazine, Nov. 13, 2007
It is not possible to engage in the direct apostolate without being a soul of prayer. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as he was aware of oneness with his Father. Our activity is truly apostolic only insofar as we permit him to work in us and through us with his power, with his desire, with his love.
MOTHER TERESA, A Gift for God
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
- The fruit
- and the purpose
- of prayer
- is
- to be oned with
- and like
- God
- in all things.
JULIAN OF NORWICH, Meditations with Julian of Norwich
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
- Not in tears should we pray,
- But in hope, smiling bright,
- When the glory of day
- Has forgotten the night!
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Pray--Not When in Tears"
If you just sit around praying, nothing gets done.
NORA ROBERTS, Blue Smoke
Prayer is more powerful than armies, in the end.
S. M. STIRLING, The Sunrise Lands
To pray without faith is to make a small fire while it is raining heavily.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
PHILIP YANCEY, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
I used to think that I needed to get all my motives straightened out before I could pray, really pray. I would be in some prayer group, for example, and I would examine what I had just prayed and think to myself, "How utterly foolish and self-centered; I can't pray this way!" And so I would determine never to pray again until my motives were pure. You understand, I did not want to be a hypocrite. I knew that God is holy and righteous. I knew that prayer is no magic incantation. I knew that I must not use God for my own ends. But the practical effect of all this internal soul-searching was to completely paralyze my ability to pray.
RICHARD J. FOSTER, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home
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
Prayer is essentially a partnership of the redeemed child of God working hand in hand with God toward the realization of His redemptive purposes on earth.
JACK W. HAYFORD, Prayer Is Invading the Impossible
Prayer is a nonlocative, nongeographic space that one enters at one's own peril, for it houses God during those few moments of one's presence there, and what is there will most surely change everything that comes into it. Prayer, its opal walls polished to transparency by the centuries of hands that have touched them, is the Tabernacle realized and the wayside chapel utilized. Ever traveling as we travel, moving as we move, prayer grips like home, until the heart belongs nowhere else and the body can scarcely function apart from them both. Prayer is dangerous and the entrance way to wholeness.
PHYLLIS TICKLE, Prayer Is a Place
If one man prays and another curses, whose voice will the Lord hear?
As a coal is revived by incense, so prayer revives the hopes of the heart.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
God's answers are wiser than our prayers.
CROFT M. PENTZ, The Complete Book of Zingers
|
|
|
