Finding the right words to express faith and hope can be deeply uplifting, especially during challenging times. Inspirational prayer quotes have a unique way of comforting the soul, strengthening belief, and reminding us of the power of connection with the divine. In this curated collection of 147 handpicked prayer quotes, you’ll discover timeless wisdom and encouragement to inspire your spiritual journey and bring peace to your heart. Whether you seek solace, motivation, or a moment of reflection, these quotes offer a meaningful reminder of faith’s enduring strength.
1. “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one” - Bruce Lee
2. “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.” - Tennessee Williams
3. “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."[Mark Twain, a Biography]” - Mark Twain
4. “Let us never forget to pray. God lives. He is near. He is real. He is not only aware of us but cares for us. He is our Father. He is accessible to all who will seek Him.” - Gordon B. Hinckley
5. “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” - Martin Luther
6. “A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.” - Roger Zelazny
7. “Prayer may just be the most powerful tool mankind has.”~Blink” - Ted Dekker
8. “Prayer's a very tricky business.” - Dodie Smith
9. “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.” - Hudson Taylor
10. “You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.” - Barbara Kingsolver
11. “God's in His heaven, alls right with the world', whispered Anne softly.” - L.M. Montgomery
12. “Really, there was only one sensible thing to do. Stay the course. Pray it through, day by day, minute by minute. The Lord had an answer and it would surely come. (p. 203)” - Janice Hanna
13. “Prayer is a path where there is none.” - Noah BenShea
14. “As a prayer popper, I stay in touch with God. I send lots of spiritual postcards. Little bits and bytes of adoration, supplication, and information attached prayer darts speed in God's direction all day long.” - Sybil MacBeth
15. “Since words elude me when I need them most, I learned long ago that I cannot count on QUALITY time with God when I want to pray. I need QUANTITY and regularity. Quality is not something I can predict. My husband, Andy, and I might schedule an elaborate evening out with candles and a gourmet meal, but there is no guarantee that we'll have a wonderful time together -- chopping onions peppers die by side in the kitchen, reading together on the couch, sitting on the front step watching our sons ride bikes, and making plans for our life together. ” - Sybil MacBeth
16. “To my surprise, I had not just doodled, I had prayed (I drew new shapes and names of each friend and focused on the person whose name stared at me from the paper). I had though OF each person as I drew but not ABOUT each person. I could just sit with them in a variation on stillness. I could hold them in prayer.” - Sybil MacBeth
17. “Where there is prayer, the fallen spirits have no power.” - Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
18. “Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.” - Joan Chittister
19. “If I am right, Thy grace impartStill in the right to stay;If I am wrong, O, teach my heartTo find that better way!” - Alexander Pope
20. “For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God.” - Brennan Manning
21. “I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend,that together we may succeed in building a better worldthrough human understanding and love,and that in doing so we may reducethe pain and suffering of all sentient beings.” - His Holliness the Dalai Lama
22. “Above all, we pray that they will make the journey from selfishness to true love. Whether together or single, this is a journey we all have to make. In a sense it is the real journey of life.” - Jane Ross-MacDonald
23. “Learn to pray. Pray often. Pray in your mind, in your heart. Pray on your knees. Prayer is your personal key to heaven. The lock is on your side of the veil. And I have learned to conclude all my prayers with ‘Thy will be done’ (Matthew 6:10; see also Luke 11:2; 3 Nephi 13:10).” - Boyd K. Packer
24. “Praying demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen
25. “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
26. “Prayer can solve more problems, alleviate more suffering, prevent more transgression, and bring about greater peace and contentment in the human soul than can be obtained in any other way.” - Thomas S. Monson
27. “Ask , and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!” - Elizabeth Gaskell
28. “(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests.” - Eca De Queiroz
29. “Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer. ” - Mary Baker Eddy
30. “When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.” - C.S. Lewis
31. “According to Benedict's scheme, the community reads through... the entire book of Psalms every week. The monks are therefore exposed... to all the despairing, doubtful, bitter, vindictive, jingoistic, nationalistic, and seemingly racist passages in the Psalter. It is not that every sentiment expressed by a psalmist is admirable, but that in praying the Psalms, we confront ourselves as we really are. The Psalms are a reality check to keep prayer from becoming sentimental, superficial, or detached from the real world.” - Richard H. Schmidt
32. “God bless us, every one!” - Charles Dickens
33. “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.[Quoting Reverend Phillips Brooks, during Remarks at Presidential Prayer Breakfast, February 7 1963]” - John F. Kennedy
34. “Nay, in many cases open denials of prayer prove the most excellent answers, and God's not hearing us is the most signal audience. Therefore at the foot of every prayer subscribe "thy will be done," and thou shalt enjoy preventing mercies that thou never soughtest, and converting mercies to change all for the best, resting confident in this, that having asked according to his will he heareth thee.” - Samuel Lee
35. “Sometimes the best answers to prayer are the ones God doesn't answer.” - Robin Jones Gunn
36. “Lord, Give me the strength not to bitch slap this woman.” - J.D. Robb
37. “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
38. “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
39. “Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working-because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.” - Jennifer Michael Hecht
40. “Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.” - A.W. Tozer
41. “Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already” - C.S. Lewis
42. “There is nothing that we are enduring that Jesus does not understand, and He waits for us to go to our Heavenly Father in prayer. If we will be obedient and if we are diligent, our prayers will be answered, our problems will diminish, our fears will dissipate, light will come upon us, the darkness of despair will be dispersed, and we will be close to the Lord.” - Robert D. Hales
43. “I don't mean to be ungrateful but if someone's out there answering prayers, mine's not at the top of the list” - Franny Billingsley
44. “You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child. The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can't understand His will; He can't be explained in a book. He didn't abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change. He simply is. I don't pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don't need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.” - Nando Parrado
45. “God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.” - Phillip Yancey
46. “Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.” - Phillip Yancey
47. “He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.” - Voltaire
48. “Prayer is thinking deeply about something in the presence of God.” - Wayne Cordeiro
49. “... I told him I was so happy that I had nothing else to pray for. 'Why,'says I, I've got prayers to sell. ” - Sandra Dallas
50. “Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.” - Thomas Aquinas
51. “The sooner I learn to forget myself in the desire that He may be glorified, the richer will be the blessing that prayer will bring to myself. No one ever loses by what he sacrifices to the Father.” - Andrew Murray
52. “Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.” - Martyn Lloyd-Jones
53. “You may be confident that if something is necessary for the carrying out of His will in your life, God is ready to give it…If they [desires] are not mere whims to bring only momentary satisfaction or glory to us but are rather true desires to accomplish more good and live more fully to His glory, then it will be in accordance with His will. Only a careful searching of your heart can allow you to know the motivation that prompts your prayer.” - John Bisagno
54. “For those who have already experienced the grace of Almighty God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, prayer becomes the catalyst for fellowship with the Lord of our souls, redeemed by his blood. By tapping into the channel by which we commune with the One who calls his children “friends,” we can receive his strength in our weakness; his guidance in our steps; and his mercy when we stumble along life’s path.” - Franklin Graham
55. “Answered prayer is the interchange of love between the Father and His child.” - Andrew Murray
56. “Writing is prayer.” - Franz Kafka
57. “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
58. “Prayer is our yearning for God, the cry of our poverty and misery, stretching out toward the throne of His divine mercy.” - Emmanuel D'Alzon
59. “Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.” - Oswald Chambers
60. “...pray for the grace to realize that no matter where you are, you are in the presence of the Lord.” - Ann Spangler
61. “God is a person, and his universe reflects his personhood. The closer something is to the character of God, the more it reflects him and the less it can be measured. Things such as integrity, beauty, hope, and love are all in the same category as prayer. You can tell their presence and even describe them, but you can't define them, simply because they are too close to God's image.” - Paul E. Miller
62. “When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.” - Paul E. Miller
63. “As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.” - Paul E. Miller
64. “Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father's world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.” - Paul E. Miller
65. “Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)” - Tim Willocks
66. “The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed...." I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw.” - C.S. Lewis
67. “Cause that's the way prayer do. It's like electricity, it keeps things going.” - Kathryn Stockett
68. “What a study in importunity, in earnestness, in persistence, promoted and propelled under conditions which would have disheartened any but a heroic, constant soul. [Jesus] teaches that an answer to prayer is conditional upon the amount of faith that goes to the petition. To test this, He delays the answer. the superficial pray-er subsides into silence, when thteanswer is delayed. But eh man of prayer hangs on, and on. The Lord recognizes and honors his faith, and gives him a rich and abundant answer to His faith evidencing, importunate prayer.” - E.M. Bounds
69. “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.” - Khalil Gibran
70. “I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” - Frederick Douglass
71. “He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.” - Brother Lawrence
72. “Today Lord I am going to do my best with Your help and for Your glory. I realize that there are many different people in the world with a variety of opinions and expectations. I will concentrate on being a God-pleaser and not a self-pleaser or man-pleaser. The rest I leave in Your hands lord. Grant me favor with You and with men and continue transforming me into the image of Your dear Son. Thank You Lord.” - Joyce Meyer
73. “May our effort, confidence and concern for others be the altar from which we pray for personal abundance.” - Laura Teresa Marquez
74. “We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.” - Russell D. Moore
75. “I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.” - Terry Tempest Williams
76. “Prayer is helplessness plus faith.” - Bill Thrasher
77. “That wish - that prayer - both men and women would have scorned me for - "But, Father, Thou wilt not despise!" I said, and felt that it was true.” - Anne Brontë
78. “Lord, teach me to be generous;Teach me to serve you as you deserve;To give and not to count the cost;To fight and not to heed the wounds;To toil, and not to seek for rest;To labor, and not to ask for reward - except to know that I am doing your will.” - St. Ignatius of Loyola
79. “Keep on the watch and pray” - Jehovah
80. “Thy will be done, my Lord. Because you know the weakness in the heart of yourchildren, and you assign each of them only the burden they can bear. May youunderstand my love–because it is the only thing I have that is really mine, the only thing that I will be able to take with me into the next life. Please allow it to be courageous and pure; please make it capable of surviving the snares of the world.” - Paulo Coelho
81. “You asked the Holy Spirit for a miracle, and now that you’ve got one you’re trying to argue it away. People who don’t believe in miracles shouldn’t pray for them.” - David Wilkerson
82. “كل ذلك، مهما علا شأنه ومكانته دنيويًا، سيكون - في النهاية - مثل جثة منتفخة لحيوان نافق .. إذا لم يكن هناك صلاة.” - د. أحمد خيري العمري
83. “When you find yourself in one of those mystical/devotional frames of mind or in am emergency and you feel you want to pray, then pray. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray or feel prevented by thinking yourself unworthy in any way. Fact is whatever terrible thing you may have done, praying will always turn your energy around for the better.Pray to whomever, whatever, and whenever you choose. Pray to the mountain, pray to the ancestors, pray to the Earth, pray to the Tao (but it won’t listen!), pray to the Great Mother, pray to Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Lakshmi, Siva, pray to the Great Spirit, it makes no difference. Praying is merely a device for realigning the mind, energy, and passion of your local self with the mind, energy and passion of your universal self. When you pray, you are praying to the god or goddess within you. This has an effect on your energy field, which in turn translates into a positive charge that makes something good happen.” - Stephen Russell
84. “I came to set fire to the earth. And I am watchful that the fire grow.May the fire of love grow in our hearts. May the fire of transformation glow in our movements. May the fire of purification burn away our sins. May the fire of justice guide our steps. May the fire of wisdom illuminate our paths. May the fire that spreads over the Earth never be extinguished.” - Paulo Coelho
85. “…be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer” - Alla Renee Bozarth
86. “The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will.” - Thomas Merton
87. “The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.” - Jodi Picoult
88. “I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God, or such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that He was within me or that I was wholly engulfed in Him. This was in no sense a vision: I believe it is called mystical theology. The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, I think, is almost lost; while the understanding, I believe, thought it is not lost, does not reason—I mean that it does not work, but is amazed at the extent of all it can understand; for God wills it to realize that it understands nothing of what His Majesty represents to it.” - Santa Teresa de Jesús
89. “The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.” - E.M. Bounds
90. “May your GodExtend to youThe same LoveAnd CompassionYou have ProvidedTo Others.” - Kent Forrest
91. “Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn't complicated. 'I speak; you believe My word; your son will be fine.' We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitations are His.” - Charles R. Swindoll
92. “Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.” - Elisabeth Elliot
93. “Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims.” - Elisabeth Elliot
94. “He splashed into the water, his whole body, not with the reverent attitude of prayer, but with a desperate thirst; he buried his head under the water and drank deep, with his cheek against the cold stone of the riverbed, the water tumbling over his back, his calves. He drank and drank, lifted his head and shoulders above the water to gasp in the evening air, and then collapsed into the water again, to drink as greedily as before.It was a kind of prayer, though, he realized as he emerged, freezing cold as the water evaporated from his skin in the breeze of the dark morning.I am with you, he said to the Oversoul. I'll do whatever you ask, because I long for you to accomplish your purpose here.” - Orson Scott Card
95. “Father, in those moments of utter exasperation, help me to want You as much as I need You!” - Evinda Lepins
96. “What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use -- men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men -- men of prayer.” - E.M. Bounds
97. “Some of the most challenging work a suicide survivor can do is to pray. To pray fully, survivors must bring all of themselves to the prayer: their anger, disappointment, fears, insecurities, and why's. I bring all of me into an encounter with God, aware that nothing in the human experience, or the human response to the ambushes of life, is alien to God.” - Harold Ivan Smith
98. “(On surviving on the raft for 47 days) We had truly made it on a wing and prayer.” - Louis Zamperini
99. “This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!” - William Wilberforce
100. “... love for our neighbours does not die the minute we enter heaven, it intensifies.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
101. “Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.” - A Course in Miracles
102. “I had no tears to shed nor a prayer for the deceased... There is no hope for the hopeless.” - Nadège Richards
103. “True prayer is done in secret, but this does not rule out the fellowship of prayer altogether, however clearly we may be aware of its dangers. In the last resort it is immaterial whether we pray in the open street or in the secrecy of our chambers, whether briefly or lenghtily, in the Litany of the Church, or with the sigh of one who knows not what he should pray for. True prayer does not depend either on the individual or the whole body of the faithful, but solely upon the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows our needs.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
104. “Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy” - John Piper
105. “If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.” - Frederick Buechner
106. “The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” - Christopher Hitchens
107. “Strange, is it not, how even those of us who scoff at divine intervention will fall to our knees and clasp our hands the moment we realize our futures are defined by uncertainty and hazard. A thoughtful man would never leave his knees. A wise man would never drop to them. In any case, it wasn’t really a prayer, but one does like to follow convention now and then.” - Andrew Levkoff
108. “Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.'" Moira smiled as she quoted the ancient sage, then shrugged. "It made sense to me. After that, I started laying my problems and needs before God and asking for grace and guidance and whatever other virtues he thought I needed.” - Irene Hannon
109. “Do you not pray, Miss Smallwood?'She avoided his gaze. 'No.''God is speaking to you every day,' he said softly. 'You might return the favor.'She raised her chin. 'I don't hear Him.''Do you listen?'She looked at him, clearly offended, then turned away again. 'I used to pray, until I found God was not listening, at least not to my prayers.'[He] heard the inner voice of caution but barreled ahead. 'He was listening. But He doesn't always answer the way we would like Him to.” - Julie Klassen
110. “The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.” - Jonathan Carroll
111. “It was a hollow victory they gave me. A crown...it was the girl I prayed them for. Your sister, safe... and mine again as she was meant to be. I ask you, Ned, what good is it to wear a crown?” - George R.R. Martin
112. “It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else.” - Naomi janowitz
113. “Man in his usual perversity turns the footstool into a throne from whence he would feign direct the Almighty as to what He ought to do, giving the onlooker the impression that if God had half the compassion that those who pray (?) have, all would quickly be right” - A.W. Pink
114. “A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.” - Anne Lamott
115. “Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.” - Oswald Chambers
116. “Is anything truly impossible? Or is it that the path to our goals appears too unclear to follow? It seems to me that if you seek hard enough, pray hard enough, you usually stumble across a scattering of breadcrumbs that marks the trail leading to the goal you once considered beyond your reach.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
117. “Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd As herds of bellowing buses drive by Love's anguish tightens your throat As if you were never to be loved again If you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up” - Guillaume Apollinaire
118. “Don’t ever discount the cry of your heart. God may be working in your heart to bring about his sovereign plan.” - K. Howard Joslin
119. “We don’t know the final outcome, or even know how long the battle will last, but we do know the referee.” - K. Howard Joslin
120. “If you want to protect me, prayer is just as powerful a weapon as that gun you carry.” - Karen Witemeyer
121. “My pastor, Pete Wilson, gave a message on prayer, specifically citing this idea many of us have that prayer is a kind of transaction. beside him on the platform, an object the size of a refrigerator stood cloaked beneath a black cover. He said, 'most of us have reduced prayer down to a transaction. A way to manipulate what we want. A vending machine.' At that point, he yanked off the cover revealing a large vending machine, loaded with all kinds of snacks. He inserted some coins and pushed the button for peanut M&Ms (smart man, my pastor). Nothing happened. He hit the machine a couple of times, tried to rock it. Nothing.He continued. 'Most of the time when we go to God, it's because we want something. If we get what we want, we turn and walk off, satisfied. If we don't get what we want, we get frustrated; we kick the machine and blame God for not answering our request.'This 'transaction' view of prayer will always disappoint us because at the root of it, we think it's all about us. but prayer is so much more than giving God a list of our wants and needs or, in some cases, our demands. Prayer is communication. It's talking and listening.” - Diane Moody
122. “Where a people prays, there is the hurch; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
123. “The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.-The Watcher in The Avengers #14” - Stan Lee
124. “I’m convinced that one of the most powerful forces on earth is the prayer of a child.” - Wess Stafford
125. “Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
126. “Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, "I hate you, God." That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months.” - Anne Lamott
127. “The kingdom comes when Jesus becomes king of your life. But it has to be your life.” - Paul E. Miller
128. “Merciful Father.... I have squandered my days with plans of many things.This was not among them. But at this moment, I beg only, to live the next few minutes well.For all we ought to have thought and have not thought... All we ought to have said and have not said. All we ought to have done and have not done. I pray thee, God for forgiveness.” - Ahmed Ibn Fadlan
129. “Prayer in private results in boldness in public.” - Edwin Louis Cole
130. “One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.” - Madeleine L'Engle
131. “Continual prayer is a lifestyle."~R. Alan Woods [2013]” - R. Alan Woods
132. “Bargaining with God is pointless. He already has a thousand followers that will do what you bargained to do for free.” - Shannon L. Alder
133. “No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer. Prayer is that which establishes contact with Divine Power and opens the invisible resources of heaven. However dark the way, when we pray, temptation can never master us. The first step downward in the average soul is the giving up of the practice of prayer, the breaking of the circuit with divinity, and the proclamation of one’s owns self sufficiency.” - Fulton J. Sheen
134. “Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.” - Pat Conroy
135. “…I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is Prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often to you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their failure, blaming themselves. Does this sound familiar? (pp. 14/Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?)” - Philip Yancey
136. “We do not pray in order to provoke God into action. If this is our view of prayer, then we are no different to the prophets of Baal who felt they had to manipulate their aloof, disinterested and fickle gods. Instead we pray because we have a God who has already shown himself to be always active in this world in the person of His Son Jesus, and because we have a confidence that He will continue to work for our good and His glory.” - James Krieg
137. “It's a sweet thing to sit quietly in the early-morning darkness and talk to God for a while. It's amazing what you gain from the conversation.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
138. “When I look back, I realize I was praying for something God had already given me.” - Steve Maraboli
139. “If we do not feel like praying, then we should pray until we do feel like praying.” - Ezra Taft Benson
140. “Prayer is the soul's sincere desire. Your desire is your prayer. It comes out of your deepest needs and it reveals the things you want in life.” - Joseph Murphy
141. “O Lord, I have been talking to the people;Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zoneAnd the recoil of my word's airy rippleMy heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.” - George MacDonald
142. “I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.” - Morris L. West
143. “Il y a des époques fatales où la prière, cet hymne naturel que Dieu a mis au fond du cœur de l’homme, devient suspecte aux yeux des hommes, car la prière est un acte d’espoir ou de reconnaissance.” - Alexandre Dumas
144. “Since God exists outside of time, He also has all of the time He needs to personally act in each of our lives. There is never a rush to the next meeting or the next message.” - Dillon Burroughs
145. “You go to bed different... tossing and turning is the norm... you wake to a sunny day but clouds follow you wherever you go. You wonder if you are strong enough to climb out of the depression you are living in and your prayers to God seem empty because you are sooo very tired of telling him the same thing over and over again..... if we are really being real... there may even be moments after impact you forget how to pray... maybe you don't even want to.” - Erica Stone
146. “Why is it that we feel bad when “all” we can do for a person is pray for them? We feel like we need to work to help, but remember: prayer is the work.” - Dillon Burroughs
147. “She inhaled a worry. She exhaled a prayer." Mary Lou Quinlan, author” - Mary Lou Quinlan
