You thought God was to hear and answer you by making everything straight and pleasant-not so are nations or churches or men and women born; not so is character made. God is answering your prayer in His way.
Mary Slessor

I have learned to move man by prayer alone.
Hudson Taylor

His prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God.
Brother Lawrence

God knows what’s in our hearts. We might as well get right to the point.
Bruce Bickel

The morning watch is essential. You must not face the day until you have faced God, nor look into the face of others until you have looked into His. You cannot expect to be victorious, if the day begins only in your own strength. Face the work of every day with the influence of a few thoughtful quiet moments with your heart and God. Do not meet other people, even those of your own home, until you have first met the great guest and honored Companion of your life, Jesus Christ.
Streams in The Desert

Stop praying for things and start praying for people.
Bret Nicholaus

True prayer is a spontaneous outpouring of honesty and need from the soul’s foundation. In calm times, we say a prayer. In desperate times, we truly pray.
David Jeremiah

His safest haven was prayer; not of a single moment or idle, but prayer of long devotion…walking, sitting, eating or drinking, he was always intent upon prayer.
Thomas of Celano on Francis of Assisi

Prayer should not be regarded as a duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege to be enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty.
E. M. Bounds

We may pray most when we say least, and we may pray least when we say most.
Augustine of Hippo

I have found silence to be a powerful element in prayer. To learn to be alone with God even in the presence of others is something we Christians should try to do. There are innumerable times during the day when we can turn our thoughts, even for a moment, from business affairs and center them on God’s goodness, Christ’s love, our fellow man’s needs.
J. C. Penney

Every day you have another opportunity to affect your future with the words you speak to God.
Stormie Omartian

Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.
Oswald Chambers

The only certainties that don’t break down are those acquired in prayer.
Reinhold Schneider

Prayer is not the moment when God and humans are in relationship, for that is always.  Prayer is taking initiative to intentionally respond to God’s presence.
L. Robert Keck

If you can’t seem to put the brakes on impulsive behavior, you’re probably not praying hard enough.
Jim Gallery

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.
William Inge

Who goes to bed and does not pray
Maketh two nights to every day.
George Herbert

God wants us to pray and will tell us how to begin where we are.
The Cloud of Unknowing

If Jesus had to take time alone with God, then we surely need to.
Sharon Daugherty

Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.
Unknown

Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of our recollection, the seat of mediation, the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest.
Jeremy Taylor

One of our consistent prayers should be for God to reveal the hypocrite in our hearts.

Lisa Harper

As I work through my day, I often find myself praying after each task.  “What’s next, Lord?”  And before I walk into any room for a meeting, I always say a silent prayer, asking God to give me wisdom for that meeting.  Prayer is the key to staying connected to God, and staying connected is the key to God’s power and effectiveness.  I recently tweeted this: “Much prayer- much power.  Little prayer- little power.  No prayer- no power.”  If I am not quietly talking to God as I do my work, I am not depending on him at that moment.  And if I don’t talk to God about what I’m doing, it shows that I’m doing it on my own power.
Rick Warren

The severe drought this summer in the south prompted a visiting pastor to pray for rain.  The next day there was a torrential downpour that ruined the crops.  “Well that’s what happens,” said one of the farmers wryly, “When you get a pastor that ain’t familiar with agriculture.”
Unknown

To try to pray is to pray.  You can’t fail at it.  It’s the only human endeavor I can think of where trying is doing.  Reaching out is holding on.  Joining in is letting go.
Rick Hamlin

Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are certain moments when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo

Fight all your battles on your knees and you win every time.
Charles Stanley

I live in the spirit of prayer.  I pray as I walk about, when I lie down, and when I rise up.  And the answers are always coming.
George Muller

Beware in your prayer, above everything, of limiting God- not only by unbelief, but by fancying that you know what he can do.
Andrew Murray

Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner

I have often learned much more in one prayer than I have been able to glean from much reading and reflection.
Martin Luther

Our prayers lay the track down on which God’s power can come. Like a mighty locomotive, his power is irresistible, but it cannot reach us without rails.
Watchman Nee

People who are in the habit of praying – and they include the mystics of the Christian tradition – know that when a prayer is answered, it is never answered in a way that you expect.
Kathleen Norris

Prayer is the mortar that holds our house together.
Mother Teresa

Prayer is the very highest energy of which the mind is capable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The self-sufficient does not pray, the self-satisfied will not pray, the self-righteous cannot pray. No man is greater than his prayer life.
Leonard Ravenhill

What a man is on his knees before God, that he is – and nothing more. Robert McCheyne

Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself.
Mother Teresa

God often gives in one brief moment that which he has for a long time denied.
Thomas Kempis

God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.
Unknown

Silence is the first language of God; all else is a poor translation.  Thomas Merton

A day without prayer is a boast against God.
Owen Carr

God always answers our prayer. Either he changes the circumstances, or he supplies sufficient power to overcome them.
Unknown

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.
Oswald Chambers

In intercessory prayer, one seldom ends where one began.
Douglas Steere

Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of Omnipotence.
J. Edwin Hartill

I have so many things to do today, I dare not ignore my time with God. Martin Luther

He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.
William Law

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.
Abraham Lincoln

A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.
Soren Kierkegaard

Many a fellow is praying for rain with his tub the wrong side up.
Sam Jones

Some prayers have a longer voyage than others, but they return with the richer lading at last, so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.
William Gurnall

How can you expect God to speak in that gentle and inward voice which melts the soul, when you are making so much noise with your rapid reflections? Be silent, and God will speak again.
Francois Fenelon

I have had prayers answered – most strangely so sometimes – but I think our heavenly Father’s loving kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.
Lewis Carroll

Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.
Phillips Brooks

In intercessory prayer, one seldom ends where one began.
Douglas Steere

There is no greater intimacy with another than that which is built through holding him or her up in prayer.
Douglas Steere

Every time we pray our horizon is altered, our attitude to things is altered, not sometimes but every time, and the amazing thing is that we don’t pray more.
Oswald Chambers

To pray is to change.  This is a great grace.  How good of God to provide a path whereby our lives can be taken over by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.
Richard J. Foster

Oh, men and women, pray through; pray through!  Do not just begin to pray and pray a little while and throw up your hands and quit, but pray and pray and pray until God bends the heavens and comes down!
R. A. Torrey

In order to grow in grace, we must be much alone.  It is not in society that the soul grows most vigorously.  In one single quite hour of prayer it will often make more progress than in days of company with others.  It is in the desert that the dew falls freshest and the air ifs purest.
Horatius Bonar

It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.
Oswald Chambers

I ought to pray before seeing anyone.  Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o’clock before I begin secret prayer.  This is a wretched system.  It is unscriptural.  Christ arose before day and went into solitary place.  David says:  “Early will I seek thee; Thou shalt early hear my voice.”  Family prayer loses much of its power and sweetness, and I can do no good to those who come to seek from me.  The conscience feels guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not trimmed.  Then when I secure prayer the soul is often out of tune.  I feel it is far better to begin with God- to see his face first, to get my soul near him before it is near another.
Robert Murray McCheyne

Prayer crowns God with the honor and glory due to His name, and God crowns prayer with assurance and comfort. The most praying souls are the most assured souls.
Thomas Brooks

We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane; the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen.
Oswald Chambers

Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one’s heart.  It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Our prayer will be most like the prayer of Christ if we do not ask God to show us what is going to be, or to make any particular thing happen, but only pray that we may be faithful in whatever happens.
Father Andrew

Prayerless people cut themselves off from God’s prevailing power, and the frequent result is the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed, overrun, beaten down, pushed around, defeated.  Surprising numbers of people are willing to settle for lives like that.
Bill Hybels

He prays well who is so absorbed with God that he does not know he is praying.
Francois de Sales

God never denied that soul anything that went as far as heaven to ask it.
John Trapp

Let me burn out for God. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. Oh, that I may be a man of prayer!
Henry Martyn

The greatest good and the most profitable gain come when we are up against a blank wall. Then we learn to pray in plain language.
Arthur Lynip

Prayer is necessary because everything else is an illusion.
John Garvey

What isn’t won in prayer first, is never won at all.
Malcolm Cronk

The degree of our faith is the degree of our prayer.
The strength of our hope is the strength of our prayer.
The warmth of our charity is the warmth of our prayer.
Carlo Carretto

God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking.
Catherine Marshall

Do not let us fail one another in interest, care and practical help; but supremely we must not fail one another in prayer.
Michael Baughen

Prayer is aspiration.  The self-satisfied disregard it.  They who reach for higher things find it a necessity.
Prayer is a discipline.  They who seek meaning and purpose in life discover it a wise teacher.
Prayer is an art.  We perfect it through practice.
Gradually, the interval between prayer and deed diminishes- until, at last, all life becomes a sanctuary.
Alvin Fine

No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters.  Failing here, we fail everywhere.
Leonard Ravenhill

I need the opportunity to free my mind of sorrow, personal concerns; to see my world through the mirrored reflection of holiness.  I need a time of prayer to leap beyond what is limiting in me as a person, to rediscover what is important and what is trivial, to take counsel with what my tradition stresses as the living faith.  I need prayer.
Albert Silverman

If Christ Himself needed to retire from time to time to the mountain-top to pray, lesser men need not be ashamed to acknowledge that necessity.
B. H. Streeter

The time of business does not differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.
Brother Lawrence

Prayer of a soldier; “Oh, Lord, don’t let nothin’ get hold of me that you and me can’t handle!”
Unknown

God has one Son who lived without sin, but he has no Son who lived without prayer.
Unknown

Never give up praying until the answer comes.
George Muller 

God does not stand afar off as I struggle to speak. He cares enough to listen with more than casual attention. He translates my scrubby words and hears what is truly inside. He hears my sighs and uncertain gropings as fine prose.
Timothy Jones

Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.
Madeleine L’Engle

If you can’t pray a door open, don’t pry it open.
Lyell Rader 

Prayer is a choice. For us to pray to give thanks, or to voice our questions and doubts shows that we are choosing to leave an opening in our spirits. Without this opening, there is no vessel, no place into which God can breathe.
Joanna Laufer

We don’t pray to get God’s attention.  We pray to turn our attention toward him.
Christopher Knippers 

Now, boys, remember one thing; do not make long prayers; always remember that the Lord knows something.
(A  speaker addressing a graduating class at a theological seminary in Tennessee.)
Unknown

Avail yourself of the greatest privilege [prayer] this side of heaven. Jesus Christ died to make this communion and communication with the Father possible.
Billy Graham

The value of prayer is not that He will hear us…but that we will finally hear Him.
William McGill

God’s ultimate will is unchanging, but the way in which he chooses to realize this will is dependent on the prayers of his children.  He wants us as covenant partners, not as automons or slaves.
Donald Bloesch