The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.

your thoughts concerning God are too human.

Before you pray, check to see whether you believe or doubt that you will be heard. If you are doubting or uncertain, or if you are merely trying a prayer to see what happens, your prayer won't be worth anything.

For more than twenty years I was a pious monk, read Mass daily, and so weakened myself with fasting and praying that I would not have been long for this life had I continued. Yet all this taken together cannot help me in even one little crisis to be able to say before God: 'All this I have done, now please consider it, and be gracious to me.' What else did I achieve with this than to plague myself uselessly, impair my health, and waste my time?

God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer.

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.

The first level of understanding necessary to faith is becoming critically aware of our dilemma in life without God.

To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.

Repentance always brings a person to the point of saying, "I have sinned." The surest sign that God is at work in his life is when he says that and means it. Anything less is simply sorrow for having made foolish mistakes—a reflex action caused by self-disgust.

One of the reasons of stultification in prayer is that there is no imagination, no power of putting ourselves deliberately before God.

He gives us the gift of holiness, are we exercising it?