Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henri Nouwen

the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing-- that demands real effort.

Hesiod

Actions from youth, advice from the middle-aged, prayers from the aged.

Henry Paulson

I have relied on prayer for health care all of my life.

Helen Prejean

I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.

Hilary Mantel

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

Henry Ward Beecher

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.

Henry Ward Beecher

I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.

Henry Ward Beecher

His nature is such that our often coming does not tire him. The whole burden of the whole life of every man may be rolled on to God and not weary him, though it has wearied man.

Henry Ward Beecher

Prayer covers the whole of man's life. There is no thought, feeling, yearning, or desire, however low, trifling, or vulgar we may deem it, which if it affects our real interest or happiness, we may not lay before God and be sure of sympathy.

Henry Ward Beecher

Prayer is often an argument of laziness: "Lord, my temper gives me a vast deal of inconvenience, and it would be a great task for me to correct it; and wilt thou be pleased to correct it for me, that I may get along easier?" If prayer was answered under such circumstances, independent of action of natural laws, it would be paying a premium on indolence.

Henry Ward Beecher

I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but as I live longer, and see more of life, I begin to believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.

Henry Ward Beecher

There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with temptation than singing with prayer.

Henry Ward Beecher

I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.

Henry James

Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey.

John Knowles

Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Over the trackless past, somewhere, Lie the lost days of our tropic youth, Only regained by faith and prayer, Only recalled by prayer and plaint, Each lost day has its patron saint!

Khalil Gibran

if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing

Khalil Gibran

For what is prayer but the expansion of your self into the living ether?

Khalil Gibran

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

Jonathan Swift

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.

Jonathan Reckford

The entire Habitat family mourns the loss of our founder, a true giant in the affordable housing movement. Our prayers are with the entire Fuller family.

Jonathan Raban

Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.

Jonathan Sacks

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

The first of the request prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole.

Jonathan Sacks

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

Napoleon Hill

If you pray for a thing, but have fear as you pray, that you may not receive it, or that your prayer will not be acted upon by Infinite Intelligence, your prayer will have been in vain.

Napoleon Hill

FAITH is the element, the “chemical” which, when mixed with prayer, gives one direct communication with Infinite Intelligence.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

Og Mandino

Never will I pray for the material things of the world. I am not calling to a servant to bring me food. I am not ordering an innkeeper to provide me with room. Never will I seek delivery of gold, love, good health, petty victories, fame, success, or happiness. Only for guidance will I pray, that I may be shown the way to acquire these things, and my prayer will always be answered.

Norman Mailer

We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

Norman Ralph Augustine

A recent government publication on the marketing of cabbage contains, according to one report, 26,941 words. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Gettysburg Address contains a mere 279 words while the Lord's Prayer comprises but 67.