Quotes & Sayings About Prayer By C.s. Lewis

For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into half halves - to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a weekday. Do you think he cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer - and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the 'dim religious light' of some solemn cathedral? — Lewis Carroll

In worship, God imparts himself to us. — C.S. Lewis

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep. — C.S. Lewis

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose. — C.S. Lewis

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. — C.S. Lewis

Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another ... Ten-thirty
and every other moment from the beginning of the world
is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames. — C.S. Lewis

When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn't been ignored; it's been considered & refused for your ultimate good. — C.S. Lewis

PRAYER Dear Lord, teach me to cultivate a thankful heart as a gift to You and to the world around me. Remind me when I grumble and complain that Your will for me is to speak blessings and to be a blessing to everyone I know. Amen. — Carole Lewis

They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, it — C.S. Lewis

The trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges your letters and so in time you come to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got his address wrong. — C.S. Lewis

Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle. — C.S. Lewis

Atheism rises above creeds and puts Humanity upon one plane.
There can be no 'chosen people' in the Atheist philosophy.
There are no bended knees in Atheism;
No supplications, no prayers;
No sacrificial redemptions;
No 'divine' revelations;
No washing in the blood of the lamb;
No crusades, no massacres, no holy wars;
No heaven, no hell, no purgatory;
No silly rewards and no vindictive punishments;
No christs, and no saviors;
No devils, no ghosts and no gods. — Joseph Lewis

Ne of the purposes for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art to which every being makes a conscious contribution, and in which every being is both a means and an end. — C.S. Lewis

Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. — C.S. Lewis

If you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. — C.S. Lewis

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house. — C.S. Lewis

For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. — C.S. Lewis

Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church. — C.S. Lewis

The world was made partly that there may be prayer; partly that our prayers might be answered. — C.S. Lewis

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand. — C.S. Lewis

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. — C.S. Lewis

You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'. — C.S. Lewis

In the war upon the powers of darkness, prayer is the primary and mightiest weapon, both in aggressive war upon them and their works; in the deliverance of men from their power; and against them as a hierarchy of powers opposed to Christ and His Church. — Jessie Penn-Lewis

Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand. — C.S. Lewis

Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. — C.S. Lewis

Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. — C.S. Lewis

Our struggle is
isn't it?
to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already — C.S. Lewis

I don't need politicians doing a 24-hour prayer with Oral Roberts to get our country back on track. — Lewis Black

If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now? — C.S. Lewis

Oxford

It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit's work - to hunger and aspire:

Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle's animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast 'gainst bestial solace set.

But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast.

We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men's yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit's stronghold - barred against despair. — C.S. Lewis

The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you. — C.S. Lewis

The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed ... " I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw. — C.S. Lewis

Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget. — C.S. Lewis

Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate. — C.S. Lewis

Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary - not necessarily the most important one - from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is. — C.S. Lewis

The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.' — C.S. Lewis