the prayer QUOTES

1 " Never say, " O Lord, I am a miserable sinner." Who will help you? You are the help of the universe. What in this universe can help you? What can prevail over you? You are the God of the universe; where can you seek for help? Never help came from anywhere but from yourself. In your ignorance, every prayer that you made and that was answered, you thought was answered by some Being, but you answered the prayer yourself unknowingly. The help came from yourself, and you fondly imagined that someone was sending help to you. There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm, you have built a cocoon around yourself. Who will save you? Burst your own cocoon and come out as a beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth. "

2 " After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery. "

― , Things We Couldn't Say

3 " Through the Grace of God and His medicine I am healed.” The prayer was accompanied by a vision straight out of Braveheart, a line of Scottish Highland warriors in kilts with huge shields and long spears marching in brave unison and attacking and killing the cancer. They were advancing, towards the cancer, striking and killing it with strong accurate thrusts from their sharp spears. The vision was so strong I could hear marching feet, and visibly see the cancer in me dying. “Through the Grace of God and His medicine I am healed,” became my constant prayer. The prayer awakened with me each day, coming on the wings of the morning. It followed in my heart through the day, and was on my lips as I drifted to sleep at night. "

― Edie Littlefield Sundby , The Mission Walker: I was given three months to live...

4 " I once asked a rabbi in a large congregation which prayers he used with the dying. " You mean the Mourner's Kaddish?" he asked, referring to the prayer recited on behalf of the deceased. " No," I replied. " I mean the prayers said when a person is actually dying." " Oh," he replied. " I don't know. I've never seen anyone die." He had been a congregational rabbi for almost twenty years. " I only get called when it's time to do the funeral," he explained. Clearly there is much to learn within our traditional religious communities. "

5 " Anyone who is having troubles should pray. Anyone who is happy should sing praises. Anyone who is sick should call the church's elders. They should pray for and pour oil on the person in the name of the Lord. And the prayer that is said with faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will heal that person. And if the person has sinned, the sins will be forgiven. Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so God can heal you. When a believing person prays, great things happen. (James 5:13-16) "

― , The Holy Bible: King James Version

6 " Our forgiving love toward men is the evidence of God's forgiving love in us. It is a necessary condition of the prayer of faith. "

― Andrew Murray , With Christ in the School of Prayer

7 " The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the “sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew.” I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being. "

― David James Duncan , God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right

8 " Pray the prayer nobody dares to pray. " as in heaven, so on earth" . "

9 " Your dream is the prayer the Universe makes to you, because in its fulfilment it grows together with you. "

― Dragos Bratasanu , Sleepers: A Little Book on How to Find Hope, Meaning and the Courage to Fall in Love with Your Dreams

10 " You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives. "

― Erik Larson , The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

11 " This book is dedicated to the much needed establishing of greater unity in the wider body of Christ. It is dedicated to agreement with the prayer that Jesus prayed:“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one:”John 17:20-22 NKJV "

12 " ...I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because " there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion. "

13 " I knew a young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes, and you would be surprised at the amount of opposition he had to contend with. Why, not even from the members of his own family did he receive what you could call active encouragement. His father was dead against the business from the beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly on the subject.

My friend used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had to give that plan up, because of his sister. She was somewhat religiously inclined, and she said it seemed such an awful thing to begin the day like that.

So he sat up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to bed, but that did not do, as it got the house such a bad name. People, going home late, would stop outside to listen, and then put it about all over the town, the next morning, that a fearful murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson's the night before; and would describe how they had heard the victim's shrieks and the brutal oaths and curses of the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and the last dying gurgle of the corpse.

So they let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all the doors shut; but his more successful passages could generally be heard in the sitting-room, in spite of these precautions, and would affect his mother almost to tears.

She said it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed by a shark, poor man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea - where the connection came in, she could not explain).

Then they knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the garden, about quarter of a mile from the house, and made him take the machine down there when he wanted to work it; and sometimes a visitor would come to the house who knew nothing of the matter, and they would forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and he would go out for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot of those bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was. If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad. "

― Jerome K. Jerome , Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)

14 " He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world,over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.It's dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddamn awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.And there, on his feet, he died.They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, " to keep him from helping with the prayer" . " The same force that shut down the transmitter," Ignatz Thugg said. " They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay." He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us. "

15 " We mustn’t just simply pray, but rather ask God about His desires and plans. This is the prayer of enquiry "

16 " To invoke Jesus' name is to place yourself in his presence, to open yourself to his power, his energy. The prayer of Jesus' name actually brings God closer, making him more present. He is always present in some way, since he knows and loves each one of us at every moment; but he is not present to those who do not pray as intimately as he is present to those who do. Prayers a difference; 'prayer changes things.' It may or may not change our external circumstances. (It does if God sees that that change is good for us; it does not if God sees that it is not.) but it always changes our relationship to God, which is infinitely more important than external circumstances, however pressing they may seem, because it is eternal but they are temporary, and because it is our very self but they are not. "

― Peter Kreeft , Prayer For Beginners

17 " For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

18 " The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us. "

― George Eliot , Daniel Deronda

19 " Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most. "

― Brian Doyle , The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart

20 " Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. (23-24) "

― Satchidananda , The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali