Religious Prayers Quotes & Sayings

Our prayers can go where we cannot ... there are no borders, no prison walls, no doors that are closed to us when we pray. — Brother Andrew

The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by Homo Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history. — Robert A. Heinlein

This particular May morning begins with the appearance of a procession on the corner of Pancake and Rosa Luxemburg Streets. The procession is evidently religious: it consists of eight clerical personages, well known to the entire town. But instead of censers, the clerical personages are swinging brooms, which transfers the entire action from the plane of religion to the plane of revolution. These personages are now simply unproductive elements of society performing their labor duty for the benefit of the people. Instead of prayers, golden clouds of dust rise to the heavens. ("X") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

God is good, not in some abstract, religious definition of the word "good." Not a "sit still, shut up and say your prayers" good. Not just "good for you" like cough medicine. God is really sweet, yummy to the tummy, delectable and exquisite-taste and see that the Lord is good! — John Crowder

Religion is a personal, private matter and parents, not public school officials, should decide their children's religious training. We should not have teacher-led prayers in public schools, and school officials should never favor one religion over another, or favor religion over no religion (or vice versa). I also believe that schools should not restrict students' religious liberties. The free exercise of faith is the fundamental right of every American, and that right doesn't stop at the schoolhouse door. — George W. Bush

Prayer, God's glory. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Our life is to be bound up with the life of Christ; we are to draw constantly from Him, partaking of Him, the living Bread that came down from heaven, drawing from a fountain ever fresh, ever giving forth its abundant treasures. If we keep the Lord ever before us, allowing our hearts to go out in thanksgiving and praise to Him, we shall have a continual freshness in our religious life. Our prayers will take the form of a conversation with God as we would talk with a friend. He will speak His mysteries to us personally. Often there will come to us a sweet joyful sense of the presence of Jesus. Often our hearts will burn within us as He draws nigh to commune with us as He did with Enoch. When this {130} is in truth the experience of the Christian, there is seen in his life a simplicity, a humility, meekness, and lowliness of heart, that show to all with whom he associates that he has been with Jesus and learned of Him. — Ellen G. White

Some of my earliest and fondest memories of my mother are of her kneeling at the side of per bed every night and praying. As a child, I would always get very close to her as she prayed. I would put my ear as close as I could to her mouth and try my best to hear what she was saying to God, but I never could make out the words. Today, being married to an addict myself, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what she was praying. — Barbara Bice

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard. — William Landay

The pastoral task with words is not communication but communion - the healing and restoration and creation of love relationships between God and his fighting children and our fought-over creation. Poetry uses words in and for communion.
This is hard work and requires alertness. The language of our time is in terrible condition. It is used carelessly and cynically. Mostly it is a tool for propaganda, whether secular or religious. Every time badly used and abused language is carried by pastors into prayers and preaching and direction, the word of God is cheapened. We cannot use a bad means to a good end. — Eugene H. Peterson

I have confidence that my prayers are answered because I sought God's will before I asked. — Davin Whitehurst

Self-righteousness ... is the largest idol of the human heart - the idol which man loves most and God hates most. Dearly beloved, you will always be going back to this idol. You are always trying to be something in yourself, to gain God's favour by thinking little of your sin, or by looking to your repentance, tears, prayers ; or by looking to your religious exercises, your frames, etc; or by looking to your graces, the Spirit's work in your heart. Beware of false Christs. Study sanctification to the utmost, but make not a Christ of it. — Robert Murray M'Cheyne

A journal is a great way to keep track of what happens daily in your walk with God and to record your prayers and thoughts. — David Jeremiah

Although a man has not studied a single system of philosophy, although he does not believe in any God, and never has believed, although he has not prayed even once in his whole life, if the simple power of good actions has brought him to that state where he is ready to give up his life and all else for others, he has arrived at the same point to which the religious man will come through his prayers and the philosopher through his knowledge; and so you may find that the philosopher, the worker, and the devotee, all meet at one point, that one point being self-abnegation. — Swami Vivekananda

To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES! — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In Jesus, God has put up a "Gone Fishing" sign on the religion shop. He has done the whole job in Jesus once and for all and simply invited us to believe it - to trust the bizarre, unprovable proposition that in him, every last person on earth is already home free without a single religious exertion: no fasting till your knees fold, no prayers you have to get right or else, no standing on your head with your right thumb in your left ear and reciting the correct creed - no nothing ... The entire show has been set to rights in the Mystery of Christ - even though nobody can see a single improvement. Yes, it's crazy. And yes, it's wild, and outrageous, and vulgar. And any God who would do such a thing is a God who has no taste. And worst of all, it doesn't sell worth beans. But it is good news - the only permanently good news there is - and therefore I find it absolutely captivating.
- as quoted in All Is Grace, by Brennan Manning. — Robert Farrar Capon

Faith even the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, but many of us prefer the less spectacular but safer results that come from operating in our own strength.... Do we really believe that our prayers to an invisible God can and will change the hard hearts of tyrants, break down oppressive social and religious systems, and deliver fullness of life to those who suffer in abject hopelessness. F.B. Meyer wrote, 'You do not test the resources of God until you attempt the impossible. — Jason Mandryk

Most prayers are not really questions ... and if we listen very closely, a prayer is often its own answer ... We pray because we are here - not to change the world, but to change ourselves. Because it is when we change ourselves ... that the world is changed. — Douglas Wood

Dear Gods of Heaven and Earth.
The universe has began, without a beginning.
Even if it's divided into Heaven, Earth, and Man, the essence is the same.
Although Heaven, Earth, and Man are different in form, they have the same nature.
Although Heaven is full of spirits, because there is no box to contain it, fom heaven came Man.
When the three absolutes move in harmony, energy is created, covering all the material and the spirit for the Man.
All the use of all creation may change, the basic mind is originally the bright light.
Shine on Man with respect for it, Man is the best of the universe. — Auliq Ice

I am enormously susceptible to religious environments - the music, the liturgy and the prayers. — Elaine Pagels

"I love them that love me, and glorify them that glorify me." (Proverbs 8:17, I Kings 2:30,) says the Lord of His saints. The lord gave the Holy Spirit to the saints, and they love us in the Holy Spirit. The saints hear our prayers and have the power from God to help us. The entire Christian race knows this. — Silouan The Athonite

In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual. — Robert Crumb

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety. — Jorge Luis Borges

Some have imagined and pretended that God's promises are effectual for a man in his natural state, if that man is truly earnest in his seeking and knocking. But it is visibly clear that God is under no obligation to keep such a person from eternal destruction, not even for one moment. It doesn't matter how religious the man is or how many prayers he makes. Until he believes in Christ, God is not obligated in any way to protect him. — Jason Dollar

From the beginning, the Continental Congress had official chaplains, prayers, and days of fasting and Thanksgiving. When sessions opened in 1774, fear was voiced that the religious diversity of the country would make it hard to choose a form of worship. — M. Stanton Evans

There are thousands of dialects and hundreds of languages spoken in religious countries. Do you
think God is a human who understands all that?
It's your intentions which make your prayers successful.
Do you pray out of fear, lack, or despair - or
out of positive expectations, gratitude, and love? — Maddy Malhotra

The danger, then, is that materialism is not only shaping how we live but the way we think as well. It influences our consumer tastes and our preference for high-paying jobs, but it also alters our capacity to pray, the nature of our prayers, and the ways in which religious tutelage instructs our values. — Robert Wuthnow

...the postwar revolution in America's religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower's inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase "freedom under God." As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most - not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration in Washington. — Kevin M. Kruse

Flitch, a former tailor who, in the seventeenth century, had founded the Hobblers, a religious sect named for the peculiar shackled gait they adopted as they paced out their prayers. The Hobblers' beliefs seemed to be based largely on such novel ideas as that heaven was handily located six miles above the earth's surface, and that Nicodemus Flitch had been appointed personally by God as His mouthpiece and, as such, was licensed to curse souls to eternity, whenever he felt like it. — Alan Bradley

Prayer, Holy communication with God — Lailah Gifty Akita

At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly. — Willa Cather

Prayers never bring anything ... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas — W.C. Fields

For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them. MATTHEW 18:20 OCTOBER 14 Prayer can change your life. I strongly recommend that you learn the art or science of prayer and put it to work in your life. Now this may seem to you to be just one more religious idea, without much life or sparkle to it. But that is where you would be wrong. It is the way to life itself. When I say this of prayer I do not speak of the mere mumbling of words. I do not mean formal affirmations either, although formal prayers sometimes help and some formal prayers are touched with the glory of God. What I mean is a deep, fundamental, powerful relationship of the individual to God, whereby his whole mind and heart become changed and he receives power from God within himself. I have seen such prayer change the lives of many. God's peace deeply imbedded in your mind can often have a more tranquilizing and healing effect upon nerves and tension than medicine. God's peace is itself medicinal. — Norman Vincent Peale

I have never seen an Amity religious ceremony before. I am only familiar with the religion of my parents' faction, which part of me still holds to and the other rejects as foolishness - the prayers before dinner, the weekly meetings, the acts of service, the poems about a selfless God. This is something different, something mysterious. — Veronica Roth

Prayer is an act of faith. Just by praying to God, you are declaring our trust in someone other than yourself. Your faith is increased as you pray and watch how God answers your prayers. God says in Jeremiah 33:3, Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know. God is awesome in power and there is never a time when He is not beside you. He is faithful and holy. — Charles Stanley

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. — W. Somerset Maugham

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. — Frederick Douglass

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers — Willa Cather

We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others — Harry Truman

With experience as their guiding light, Christian monks and nuns could, for example, come together with Sufis and Yogis to pray and meditate, then discuss their experiences by talking about how silence and inner peace have changed their lives, instead of talking about the content of their prayers or focusing on theology. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, who tread the path of goodness, could come together and do good works. Doing good side by side would show them that they are not as different as previously thought and that their various beliefs can lead to similar outcomes. — Gudjon Bergmann

Fools! You think of "god" as a sentient being. God is the word used to represent a force. This force created nothing, it just helps things along. It does not answer prayers, although it may make you think of a way to solve a problem. It has the power to influence you, but not decide for you. — Diogenes

There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths. — Mitt Romney

No one can sense his own weakness is at least a small temptation is not allowed to afflict either his body or his soul. Then, comparing his weakness to the help of God, a man comes to know its magnitude. But whoever does not know that he needs God's help, let him make many prayers. Insofar as he multiplies them, in that measure will he be humbled. — Isaac Of Nineveh

Mr. Lincoln's maxim and philosophy were: 'What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.' He never joined any Church. He was a religious man always, I think, but was not a technical Christian. — Mary Todd Lincoln

He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers — Zoroaster

Now. If any habits ever had time to fix upon her, they would have operated here. Habits are peculiar things. They will drive the really non-religious mind out of bed to say prayers that are only a custom and not a devotion. The victim of habit, when he has — Theodore Dreiser

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

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meets, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more 'religious' (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty careful down here[.] — C.S. Lewis

Pray regularly for the members of your family. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Ashcroft went on to say that our way of life is being threatened by a group of radical religious fanatics who are armed and dangerous. And then he called for prayers in the schools and an end to gun control. — Jay Leno

Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me. — Frederick Buechner

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies. — Carlos Fuentes

Lord deliver mankind from darkness into light — Lailah Gifty Akita

Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths. — Radhanath Swami

We must also consider the nature of prayer. It is curious that Christians are pushing so strenuously for prayer which they don't believe to he prayer. Christians pray to the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ-not to Allah, Krishna, or God-as-you-conceive-him/her-tobe. If we were successful in establishing Christian prayer in the
schools, we would be violating the religious liberties of those who are not Christians. If we establish prayer that is not Christian, what have we gained? Why fight to get prayer in the schools when you believe the prayers, once instituted, won't get past the ceiling? Do we really want our children led in a daily vain repetition? — Douglas Wilson

I am a religious person and rely heavily on prayers. — Katrina Kaif

I once asked a rabbi in a large congregation which prayers he used with the dying. "You mean the Mourner's Kaddish?" he asked, referring to the prayer recited on behalf of the deceased. "No," I replied. "I mean the prayers said when a person is actually dying." "Oh," he replied. "I don't know. I've never seen anyone die." He had been a congregational rabbi for almost twenty years. "I only get called when it's time to do the funeral," he explained. Clearly there is much to learn within our traditional religious communities. — Megory Anderson

Power deities, for all their strength, are very much like humans, They are subjects to periods of despair and are not free from the crippling consequences of emotions, For over two decades Tibetans were forbidden from holding any religious ceremonies or prayers. No prayer flags, incense or ceremonies were offered to the deities and demi-gods of the region. This neglect broke their hearts and they became bedraggled and weak. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa