Thoughts on prayer

Prayer

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Søren Kierkegaard

Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.

Mother Teresa

The Simple Path

Silence is Prayer

Prayer is Faith

Faith is Love

Love is Service

The Fruit of Service is Peace

Mother Teresa 

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

Gibran Khalil Gibran

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

Corrie ten Boom

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Francis of Assisi

In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.

Mother Teresa

Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.

L.M. Montgomery

Give me the Love that leads the way

The Faith that nothing can dismay

The Hope no disappointments tire

The Passion that'll burn like fire

Let me not sink to be a clod

Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God

Amy Carmichael

Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Mahatma Gandhi

Many people pray to be kept out of unexpected problems. 

Some people pray to be able to confront and overcome them.

Toba Beta

The more you pray, the less you'll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You'll feel more patient and less pressured.

Rick Warren

We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.

Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.

Oswald Chambers

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

I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.

Martin Luther

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.

Alexandre Dumas

The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly.

Mahatma Gandhi

For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.

Thérèse de Lisieux

Prayer makes your heart bigger, until it is capable of containing the gift of God himself. Prayer begets faith, faith begets love, and love begets service on behalf of the poor.

Mother Teresa

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.

Andrew Murray

The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.

Joseph Smith Jr.

Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?

Corrie ten Boom

I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where we left him.

Ravi Zacharias

We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.

Oswald Chambers

Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instrument afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.

James Hudson Taylor

Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.

John Bunyan

And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence,

"Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.

It is thy desire in us that desireth.

It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also.

We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all."

The best way to navigate disappointment and trials is to examine what they expose. 

“Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.”

~Tori Amos