quotations about prayer
If you pray for rain long enough, it does eventually fall. If you pray for flood-waters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections
What discord should we bring into the universe if our prayers were all answered! Then we should govern the world, and not God. And do you think we should govern it better?
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love!
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The Excursion
Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy will be done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the f*** bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His will? It's all very confusing.
GEORGE CARLIN
You Are All Diseased
Prayer that craves a particular commodity -- any thing less than all good -- is vicious.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Self-Reliance"
God shapes the world by prayer.
EDWARD MCKENDREE BOUNDS
Purpose in Prayer
For is prayer not disobedience?
The questioning of God's order?
CHRIS ABANI
Sanctificum
Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can by influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish. However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Phyllis (a child), January 24, 1936
Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
He that will learn to pray, let him go to Sea.
GEORGE HERBERT
Jacula Prudentum
What returns does prayer show? None, if it is real prayer. For prayer is for growth. We can therefore, never return to what we were thank heaven, for we are growers. So prayer is a call. And it's answered by a call. We call up and we are called on. We're summoned, told to advance, to grow. That's the nerve of prayer, as prayer is the nerve of religion.
GERALD HEARD
Reflections
PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
None of us should get so busy in our lives that we cannot contemplate with prayer. Prayer is the passport to spiritual power.
SPENCER W. KIMBALL
"Fortify Your Homes Against Evil", April 1979
Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance, and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
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
Prayer unaccompanied with a fervent love of God, is like a lamp unlighted; the words of the one without love being as unprofitable as the oil and cotton of the other without flame.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
A lot of folks would do more prayin' if they could find a soft spot for their knees.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Prayer is the expression of desire; its value comes from our inward aspirations, from their tenor and their strength. Take away desire, the prayer ceases; increase or diminish its intensity, the prayer soars upward or has no wings. Inversely, take away the expression while leaving the desire, and the prayer in many ways remains intact. Has a child who says nothing but looks longingly at a toy in a shop-window, and then at his smiling mother, not formulated the most moving prayer? And even if he had not seen the toy, is not the desire for play, innate in the child as is the thirst for movement, in the eyes of his parents a standing prayer which they grant?
ANTONIN SERTILLANGES
The Intellectual Life
I pray you'll be our eyes, and watch us where we go.
And help us to be wise in times when we don't know
Let this be our prayer, when we lose our way
Lead us to the place, guide us with your grace
To a place where we'll be safe
CELINE DION
"The Prayer"
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart, with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet