#pray

I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#brave #courage #fortitude #god #grace

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure. ↗

— Fred Allen

#crop #days #each #failure #first

The man who sows wrong thoughts and deeds and prays that God will bless him is in the position of a farmer who, having sown tares, asks God to bring forth for him a harvest of wheat. ↗

— James Allen

#bless #bring #deeds #farmer #forth

Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills. ↗

— Ray Simpson

#christianity #contemplation #contemplative-prayer #god #nature

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember. ↗

— David Antin

#always #ancient #anxiety #began #deficiencies

One positive command he gave us: You shall love and honor your emperor. In every congregation a prayer must be said for the czar's health, or the chief of police would close the synagogue. ↗

— Mary Antin

#close #command #congregation #czar #emperor

It is clear that he does not pray, who, far from uplifting himself to God, requires that God shall lower Himself to him, and who resorts to prayer not to stir the man in us to will what God wills, but only to persuade God to will what the man in us wills. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#does #far #god #him #himself

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#each #equal #member #person #perspective

He who labours, prays. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#prays #who

But no nation can base its survival and development on luck and prayers alone while its leadership fritters away every available opportunity for success and concrete achievement. ↗

— Ibrahim Babangida

#alone #available #away #base #concrete