Quotes about Prayer

What's been happening in your life lately? What's the greatest challenge in your life right now? What's the most significant thing happening in your life right now? You sound like you're carrying a heavy load. Is there any way I can help? How can I pray for you?

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional "threat," you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love.

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

But in this book, I use "prayer" as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.

To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.

In short, good leaders must have a certain capacity for non-polarity thinking and full-access knowing (prayer), a tolerance for ambiguity ( faith), an ability to hold creative tensions (hope), and an ability to care (love) beyond their own personal advantage.

Without an inner life, our outer prayer will soon become superficial, ego-centered, and even counterproductive on the spiritual path.

God can help you get what you want, which is still a self-centered desire, instead of God's much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11).

The unprayerful heart will always twist reality to its own liking.

Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer.