Top 100 Quotes About What Prayer Is
#1. Sometimes that's what prayer is
simply inviting God to join us where we actually are, not because He isn't already here but because inviting Him reminds us it's true.
Emily P. Freeman
#2. Do you know what prayer is? It is not begging God for this and that. The first thing we have to do is to get you beggars to quit begging until a little faith moves in your souls.
John G. Lake
#3. You cannot know what prayer is for, until you know that life is war.
John Piper
#4. We cannot know what prayer is for until we know that life is war.
John Piper
#5. Prayer works (unless God has a different plan for you, that is different than what you want). Pray now. It works best if God is undecided.
Juanita Ray
#6. The most important thing is not to get what we want in prayer, but to accomplish what God wants.
Stormie O'martian
#7. I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence-we need to listen to God because it's not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters.
Mother Teresa
#8. What wings are to a bird, and sails to a ship, so is prayer to the soul.
Corrie Ten Boom
#9. What is fear?" she breathed. 'Fear is nothing. Fear is illusion. Pass through its fire. Truth lies at its core. What it Truth?" She stood up, feeling calmer and glared up at the sinking sun. "I am Truth," she whispered fiercely.
J.D. Lakey
#11. When I pray, I pray believing that God will speak to me and give me an answer to that prayer. That's what a calling is. If I pray, a calling means that I feel like I have a sense from God.
Michele Bachmann
#12. 9. Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.
San Juan De La Cruz
#13. What is grace? I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella.
Tom Junod
#14. There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.
Terry Tempest Williams
#15. What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God.
Timothy Keller
#16. We are so busy working on God, we forget He is trying to work on us. That is what this life is all about: God at work on us, trying to remake us into vessels of glory. We are so busy praying to change things that we have little time to allow prayer to change us.
David Wilkerson
#17. When we don't hear anything from God we just don't know exactly what He is planning and we come to different conclusions that maybe He has forgotten me, maybe He doesn't hear my prayers, maybe I'm not good enough.
Nick Vujicic
#18. When asked, 'What is more important: praying or reading the Bible?' I ask, 'What is more important: breathing in or breathing out?
Russ Scalzo
#19. For this is Wisdom; to love, to live
To take what fate, or the Gods may give.
To ask no questions, to make no prayer,
To kiss the lips and caress the hair,
Spend passion's ebb as you greet its flow
To have, -to hold -and -in time, -let go!
Laurence Hope
#20. 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
#22. What then is prayer? Prayer is nothing else than talking to God, conversing with God Himself.
Paul O'Sullivan
#23. Hope doesn't like to be beaten down, though, does it? Hope is what gets us through. Hope, and the prayer it wants to become.
Jan Ellison
#24. Our aim is to appeal to reason. ... Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.
Carter G. Woodson
#25. Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.
Ilya Ehrenburg
#26. Sometimes when we say "God is silent," what's really going on is that he hasn't told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.
Paul E. Miller
#27. Prayer is reaching out after the unseen; fasting is letting go of all that is seen and temporal. Fasting helps express, deepen, confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.
Andy Murray
#28. No one can believe how powerful prayer is and what it can effect, except those who have learned it by experience. Whenever I have prayed earnestly, I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes.
Martin Luther
#29. What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.
Michael Pollan
#31. What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Thomas Merton
#32. And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.
Dallas Willard
#33. Go to the Madonna. Love her! Always say the Rosary. Say it well. Say it as often as you can! Be souls of prayer. Never tire of praying, it is what is essential. Prayer shakes the Heart of God, it obtains necessary graces!
Pio Of Pietrelcina
#34. In the foothills of the Himalayas, one hears the prayer: "Oh Lord, we know not what is good for us. You know what it is. For it we pray."
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#35. The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.
Dallas Willard
#36. Everybody works ... That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.
Susan Vreeland
#37. Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.
Jonathan Sacks
#38. Pride is really very simple. It is the attitude of the spoiled brat: "I want what I want when I want it, and if you say No to me, I hate you." "Thy will be done" is the essential prayer of the saint; "my will be done" is the essential demand of the sinner.
Peter Kreeft
#39. Our real work is prayer. What good is the cold iron of our frantic little efforts unless first we heat it in the furnace of our prayer? Only heat will diffuse heat.
Mother Maribel
#40. In prayer we can approach God with complete assurance of His ability to answer us. There is no limit to what we can ask, if it is according to His will.
John F. Walvoord
#41. What I think is critically important is that there are lots of studies on how prayer effects people that are ill, lots of studies, and I know in my life my prayers have been answered.
John Assaraf
#42. To me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line.
Frank Sinatra
#43. God doesn't want people to do what they think is best: he wants them to do what he knows is best, and no amount of reasoning and intellectualizing will discover that.
Henry T. Blackaby
#44. The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open'.
Tomas Transtromer
#45. Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.
Shane Claiborne
#46. Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.
Gerald Vann
#47. Prayer begins and ends not with the needs of man but with the glory of God (John 14:13). It should be concerned primarily with who God is, what He wants, and how He can be glorified.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#48. Where do you run for help? When you are in trouble, what is your first instinct? Do you run to others or to God? Is it usually the counsel of another rather than the counsel found in waiting upon God in prayer? Why is this the way it is? Why do we run to man before we run to God?
Kay Arthur
#49. Each life is unique. But for all, repentance will surely include passing through the portal of humble prayer. Our Father in Heaven can allow us to feel fully the conviction of our sins. He knows the depths of our remorse. He can then direct what we must do to qualify for forgiveness.
Henry B. Eyring
#50. Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.
Frederick Busch
#51. What can be more excellent than prayer; what is more profitable to our life; what sweeter to our souls; what more sublime, in the course of our whole life, than the practice of prayer!
Saint Augustine
#52. The Book of Psalms is the Bible's hymnbook. It will show you what it means to walk with God in prayer and praise.
Billy Graham
#54. Bargaining with God is pointless. He already has a thousand followers that will do what you bargained to do for free.
Shannon L. Alder
#55. Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
John Shelby Spong
#56. Father
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Give me open hands and open doors
Put your light in my eyes and let me see
That my own little world is not about me
Matthew West
#57. What is the weight of a tear? The single tear falls when the buckets have stopped, when dry eyes and a slightly raised chin sometimes let it slip, like a prayer. It carries the weight of a lifetime.
Wendy Murray
#58. For this is wisdom- to love and live To take what fate or the Gods may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, in time
let go.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#59. Lord, when I feel that what I'm doing is insignificant and unimportant, help me to remember that everything I do is significant and important in your eyes, because you love me and you put me here, and no one else can do what I am doing in exactly the way I do it.
Brennan Manning
#60. Jesus had to reveal what prayer was not, before He taught what it is.
Andrew Wommack
#61. praying without having faith in and believing in what you pray for is just a simple act of soliloquizing
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#62. 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
#63. Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.
Lauren F. Winner
#64. Prayer is not about asking what you want, but what God wants.
Shannon L. Alder
#65. O believing brethren! What an instrument is this which God hath put into your hands! Prayer moves Him that moves the universe.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne
#66. Prayer is less about trying to get God to do something we want God to do and more about getting ourselves to do what God wants us to do and to become who God wants us to become.
Shane Claiborne
#67. Mr. Lincoln's maxim and philosophy were: 'What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.' He never joined any Church. He was a religious man always, I think, but was not a technical Christian.
Mary Todd Lincoln
#68. I will tell no one what I know of the two of you. But I would ask one small price for my silence. (Damien)
And that is? (Rowena)
If you still believe in God, then say a prayer for me. He turned a deaf ear to my pleas long ago. (Damien)
Kinley MacGregor
#69. God is waiting eagerly to respond with new strength to each little act of self-control, small disciplines of prayer, feeble searching after him. And his children shall be filled if they will only hunger and thirst after what he offers.
Richard Holloway
#70. The effective prayer of faith comes from a life given up to the will and the love of God. Not as a result of what I try to be when praying, but because of what I am when I'm not praying, is my prayer answered by God. All
Andrew Murray
#71. It is not enough to say prayers: we must become, be prayer, prayer incarnate. All of life, each act, each act, every gesture, even the smile of the human face, must become a hymn of adoration, an offering, a prayer. One should offer not what one has but what one is.
Paul Evdokimov
#72. For what is prayer but the expansion of your self into the living ether?
Kahlil Gibran
#73. What is the cause of most backslidings? I believe, as a general rule, one of the chief causes is neglect of private prayer.
J.C. Ryle
#74. That is what a well-guarded prayer life can reveal about us, that our trust is not in ourselves but in seeking God's strength for what we do. Prayer is not a substitute for action, but prayer undergirds action with the strength that makes the difference.
Ravi Zacharias
#75. Mercy, GOD, mercy!": the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In
Eugene H. Peterson
#76. What most of all hinders heavenly consolation is that you are too slow in turning yourself to prayer.
Thomas A Kempis
#77. Prayer is receiving by faith what God has already done!
Andrew Wommack
#78. What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
Jenny Offill
#79. What have I done with my baptism and confirmation? Is Christ really at the center of my life? Do I have time for prayer in my life? Do I live my life as a vocation and mission?
Pope John Paul II
#80. Prayer is an investment. The time you dedicate to prayer isn't lost; it will return dividends far greater than what a few moments spent on a task ever could. If we fail to cultivate this discipline, prayer winds up being our last resort rather than our first response.
Charles R. Swindoll
#81. The Peace Panda Says: Without The Heartfelt Prayer Of Love And Compassion ... Even The Greatest Of Temples, Mosques, Synagogues and Cathedrals Of Humanity Are Spiritually Dead. What is Humanity Without It's Spirit?
Timothy Pina
#82. Never use prayer as an excuse to procrastinate doing what you already know is the right thing to do.
Rick Warren
#83. Live each day like you are celebrating your birthday - that is what life wants for you. Engage with family and friends. Indulge in good food, music and dance. You are precious to life.
Pooja Ruprell
#84. A key to improved prayer is to learn to ask the right questions. Consider changing from asking for the things you want to honestly seeking what He wants for you. Then as you learn His will, pray that you will be led to have the strength to fulfill it.
Richard G. Scott
#85. Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.
Patricia Hampl
#86. Step number one to receiving answered prayer is decide what you want from God and find the scripture or scriptures that definitely promise you these things.
Kenneth E. Hagin
#87. What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?
Marc Chagall
#88. Some very dull and sad people have genius though the world may not count it as such; a genius for love, or for patience, or for prayer, maybe. We know the divine spark is here and there in the world: who shall say under what manifestations, or humble disguise!
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
#89. [God] wants your adoration. He wants your confessions. He wants your thankfulness. He wants your requests. But most of all, He wants you and your love for Him with all your heart, strength, mind, and soul. What a joy it is to be so wanted by the Creator of everything.
Van Harden
#90. Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration with exposition needs a great push. People ask me: 'What will convert America and save the world?' My answer is prayer. What we need is for every parish to come before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament in holy hours of prayer.
Mother Teresa
#91. In the creation of individual reality, thought control, or what some might call prayer - is everything. Prayer? Thought control is the highest form of prayer. Therefore, think only on good things, and righteous. Dwell
Neale Donald Walsch
#92. "What is good for a bootless bene?" With these dark words begins my tale; And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring When prayer is of no avail?
William Wordsworth
#93. Christ remains primary in your life only when he enjoys the first place in your mind and heart. Thus you must continuously unite yourself to him in prayer ... Without prayer there can be no joy, no hope, no peace. For prayer is what keeps us in touch with Christ.
Pope John Paul II
#94. Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.
Novalis
#95. That is what God is for. Worry doesna help - prayer does. Sometimes,
Diana Gabaldon
#96. God who knows all things, I have no prayer book and I do not know any prayers by heart. But you know all the prayers. You are God. So this is what I am going to do. I am going to say the alphabet, and I will let you put the words together.
Neil Gaiman
#97. Intercessory prayer is exceedingly prevalent. What wonders it has wrought! The Word of God teems with its marvelous deeds. Believer, thou hast a mighty engine in thy hand, use it well, use it constantly, use it with faith, and thou shalt surely be a benefactor to thy brethren.
C.H.SPURGEON
#98. The journey of prayer is nothing more or less than a gradual awakening to the reality of recognizing what is already there.
Delia Smith
#99. But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.
Lauren F. Winner
#100. Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.
Dallas Willard
