If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

You don't have to leave the world to be holy and grow closer to the Holy One.

The gracious, eternal God permits the spirit to green and bloom and to bring forth the most marvelous fruit, surpassing anything a tongue can express and a heart conceive.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.

God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.

God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.

Rid yourself of anything that is not directed toward God.

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

Such sins, even if they do not kill all grace in us, do harm, nevertheless; and though they are only venial in themselves, they make us apt, ready, and inclined to lose grace and to fall into mortal sin.

A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.

In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!

Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!

Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are.

You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.

Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.

Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.

As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.

In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.

Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.

What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God.

Every true prayer is a prayer of the Church; by means of that prayer the Church prays, since it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church, Who in every single soul 'prays in us with unspeakable groanings'.

Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

In our home there was always prayer - aloud, proud and unapologetic.

He had one uniform practice, and a very bad one it was, during the time of family worship, and just three or four seconds before the conclusion of the prayer, he started to his feet, and ran barking round the apartment like a crazed beast.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words with out a heart.

God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us tap and develop these powers.

My father was an Episcopalian minister, and I've always been comforted by the power of prayer.

I mean, George Bush is a man of prayer. He talks to the lord. He tries to get his direction from the lord.

Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God.

Every Teen Challenge ministry is responsible for raising its own finances, but we assist these works with finances, prayer and counseling, especially overseas in areas such as Siberia, Africa, South America.

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

Never was a faithful prayer lost. Some prayers have a longer voyage than others, but then they return with their richer lading at last, so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.