Quotes by American Authors - Page 104

I firmly believe a great many prayers are not answered because we are not willing to forgive someone.
Dwight L. Moody
I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God. They just drop down and say a few words and then jump up and forget it and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the small boy ringing his neighbor's door-bell and then running away as fast as he can go.
E.M.Bounds
God answers all true prayer either in kind or in kindness.
Adoniram Judson
There are three answers to prayer: yes no and wait awhile. It must be recognized that no is an answer.
Ruth Stafford Peale
Real prayer seeks an audience and an answer.
William S. Plumer
Poverty chastity and obedience are extremely difficult. But there are always the graces if you will pray for them.
Katheryn Hulme
There is a time for all things a time to preach and a time to pray but those times have passed away there is a time to fight and that time has come!
General Peter Muhlenberg
Visualize "prayerize " "actionize " and your wishes will come true.
Charles L. Allen
You can do more than pray after you have prayed but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.
A.J. Gordon
God gives every bird its food but he does not throw it into the nest.
Josiah G. Holland
God help those who do not help themselves.
Wilson Mizner
Work as if you were to live one hundred years pray as if you were to die tomorrow.
Benjamin Franklin
Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended upon man.
Archbishop Francis J. Spellman
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
When you pray for anyone you tend to modify your personal attitude toward him.
Norman Vincent Peale
This is what I found out about religion: It gives you courage to make decisions you must make in a crisis and then the confidence to leave the result to a Higher Power. Only by trust in God can a man carrying responsibility find repose.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Spread out your petition before God and then say "Thy will not mine be done." The sweetest lesson I have learned in God's school is to let the Lord choose for me.
Dwight L. Moody
Pray not for lighter burdens but for stronger backs.
Theodore Roosevelt
The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not pray for easy lives pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Phillips Brooks
A Chinese Christian prayed every day .... "Lord reform Thy world beginning with me."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Women don't have halos built in.
Lorraine Hine
The possibilities of prayer are found in its allying itself with the purposes of God for God's purposes and man's praying are the combination of all potent and omnipotent forces.
E.M.Bounds
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. 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
Don't pray to escape trouble. Don't pray to be comfortable in your emotions. Pray to do the will of God in every situation. Nothing else is worth praying for.
Samuel M. Shoemaker
The purpose of prayer is not to inform God of our needs but to invite Him to rule our lives.
Clarence Bauman
We must pray for more prayer for it is the world's mightiest healing force.
Frank C. Laubach
Just pray for a tough hide and a tender heart.
Ruth Graham
Grant me the courage not to give up even though I think it is hopeless.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
Help me to work and pray Help me to live each day That all I do may say Thy kingdom come.
A.B. Simpson
We cannot ask in behalf of Christ what Christ would not ask Himself if He were praying.
A.B. Simpson
Look as a painted man is no man and as painted fire is no fire so a cold prayer is no prayer.
Thomas B. Brooks
Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God's footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.
E.M.Bounds
Importunity is a condition of prayer. We are to press the matter not with vain repetitions but with urgent repetitions. We repeat not to count the times but to gain the prayer. We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray "with all perseverance." We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We press our pleas because we must have them or die.
E.M.Bounds
To say prayers in a decent delicate way is not heavy work. But to pray really to pray till hell feels the ponderous stroke to pray till the iron gates of difficulty are opened till the mountains of obstacles are removed till the mists are exhaled and the clouds are lifted and the sunshine of a cloudless day brightens-this is hard work but it is God's work and man's best labor.
E.M.Bounds
It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer that the life-giving fire descends for none but the earnest man gets access to the ear of God.
E.M.Bounds
There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble desires listless efforts lazy attitudes all must be strenuous urgent ardent. Flamed desires impassioned unwearied insistence delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls. Our whole being must be in our praying.
E.M.Bounds
We may as well not pray at all as offer our prayers in a lifeless manner.
William S. Plumer
Cold prayers shall never have any warm answers.
Thomas B. Brooks
Religion without humanity is a poor human stuff.
Sojourner Truth
Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees. ... Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.
A.W. Tozer
When praying for healing ask great things of God and expect great things from God. But let us seek for that healing that really matters the healing of the heart enabling us to trust God simply face God honestly and live triumphantly.
Arlo F. Newell
To avail yourself of His certain wisdom ask of Him whatever questions you have. But do not entreat Him for that will never be necessary.
Hugh Prather
The clue is not to ask in a miserly way-the key is to ask in a grand manner.
Ann Wigmore
We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him by brief repetitions that are requests for personal favors and nothing more.
E.M.Bounds
Our immediate temptation will be to ask for specific solutions to specific problems and for the ability to help other people as we have already thought they should be helped. In that case we are asking God to do it our way.
Bill W.
The simple heart that freely asks in love obtains.
John Greenleaf Whittier
They tell about a fifteen-year-old boy in an orphans' home who had an incurable stutter. One Sunday the minister was detained and the boy volunteered to say the prayer in his stead. He did it perfectly too without a single stutter. Later he explained "I don't stutter when I talk to God. He loves me."
Bennett Cerf
Though smooth be the heartless prayer no ear in heaven will mind it And the finest phrase falls dead if there is no feeling behind it.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from God if they lived more obedient and well-pleasing to God.
E.M.Bounds
If we would have God in the closet God must have us out of the closet. There is no way of praying to God but by living to God.
E.M.Bounds
We cannot talk to God strongly when we have not lived for God strongly. The closet cannot be made holy to God when the life has not been holy to God.
E.M.Bounds
Our praying to be strong must be buttressed by holy living. The life of faith perfects the prayer of faith.
E.M.Bounds
Praying which does not result in pure conduct is a delusion. We have missed the whole office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify conduct. It is in the very nature of things that we must quit praying or quit bad conduct.
E.M.Bounds
Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.
E.M.Bounds
Prayer at its best is the expression of the total life for all things else being equal our prayers are only as powerful as our lives
A.W. Tozer
Prayer is a serious thing. We may be taken at our words.
Dwight L. Moody
He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
Herman Melville
It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
Henry Ward Beecher
Our prayers must spring from the indigenous soil of our own personal confrontation with the Spirit of God in our lives.
Malcolm Boyd