Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mother Teresa

Joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to re-make the distressing into the desired, the discarded into the creative. Joy is prayer-Joy is strength-Joy is love-Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Mother Teresa

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

Mother Teresa

It is not possible to engage in the direct apostolate without being a soul of prayer. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as he was aware of oneness with his Father. Our activity is truly apostolic only insofar as we permit him to work in us and through us with his power, with his desire, with his love.

Mother Teresa

The fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace, and peace begins with a smile.

Mother Teresa

Prayer is the breath of life to our soul; holiness is impossible without it

Mother Teresa

Purity is the fruit of prayer.

Mother Teresa

Prayer is in all things, in all gestures.

Mother Teresa

When I was crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons. I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.

Mother Teresa

The first requirement for prayer is silence. People of prayer are people of silence.

Mother Teresa

The more we can give in our silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life.

Mother Teresa

Prayer feeds the soul - as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul - and it brings you closer to God.

Mother Teresa

Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God's gift of Himself.

Mother Teresa

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noises and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature-trees, flowers, grass-grow in silence. Is not our mission to give God to those we walk with? Not a dead God, but a living, loving God. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. Words that don't give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

Mother Teresa

Everything starts from prayer. Without asking God for love, we cannot possess love and still less are we able to give it to others. Just as people today are speaking so much about the poor but they do not know or talk to the poor, we too cannot talk so much about prayer and yet not know how to pray.

Mother Teresa

In reality, there is only one true prayer, only one substantial prayer: Christ himself. There is only one voice which rises above the face of the earth, the voice of Christ. Prayer is oneness with Christ.

Mother Teresa

You can pray while you work. Work doesn't stop prayer and prayer doesn't stop work. It requires only that small raising of the mind to him: I love you God, I trust you, I believe in you, I need you now. Small things like that. They are wonderful prayers.

Peace Pilgrim

When I started out on my pilgrimage, I was using walking for two purposes at that time. One was to contact people, and I still use it for that purpose today. But the other was as a prayer discipline. To keep me concentrated on my prayer for peace. And after a few years I discovered something. I discovered that I no longer needed the prayer discipline. I pray without ceasing now. My personal prayer is: Make me an instrument through which only truth can speak.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.

Sean O'Casey

So let us all who pray ask for what most of them need badly, a sense of humor to lighten their way through life, making it merrier for themselves and easier for others.

Sean O'Casey

Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.

Larry Dossey

Not to employ prayer with my patients was the equivalent of deliberately withholding a potent drug or surgical procedure.

Lady Gregory

Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by God.

Neil Peart

More a paraphrase than a quote, really, but it comes from a prayer which was stitched into a sampler above my grandmother's bed. It began like this: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep...'

Marc Chagall

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

Thomas a Kempis

What most of all hinders heavenly consolation is that you are too slow in turning yourself to prayer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Sharon Creech

I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.

Neil Peart

You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray without surrender. You can fight without ever winning, but never ever win without a fight.

Mustafa Akyol

The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?

Tara Brach

My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.

Tamar Braxton

I like the Kardashians, but I do keep them on the top of my prayer list.

Leonard Bernstein

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.