Prayer Quotes
The top of this page is made of devotional writers: Bill Hybels, the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, Shakespeare, the seventh-century bishop Isaac of Nineveh and Muhammad. The sourced counterweight is sceptical. Bertrand Russell, in 1952, says things go as we wish through knowing natural laws, not through prayer and humility, and Bierce, in 1911, defines to pray as asking that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.
A weather prayer credited to General Patton is flagged misattributed. A line saying a Christian without prayer is as impossible as being alive without breathing is credited to Martin Luther King Jr. and disputed, and a “thank you” variant attributed to Meister Eckhart is disputed as well.
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
Remote from man, with God he passed the days;
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.
But let none think that public prayer will make up for closet communion.
It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.
By prayer I do not mean only the fixed Hours, the Hullale of the psalter and the liturgical hymns.