When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayers should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a short method of duty and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty; by what we require of God we see what He requires of us.—Jeremy Taylor.
How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.—Cowper.
We have assurance that we shall be heard in what we pray, because we pray to that God that heareth prayer, and is the rewarder of all that come unto Him; and in His name, to whom God denieth nothing; and, therefore, howsoever we are not always answered at the present, or in the same kind that we desire, yet, sooner or later, we are sure to receive even above that we are able to ask or think, if we continue to sue unto Him according to His will.—Archbishop Usher.
The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence.—Chapin.
So much of our lives is celestial and divine as we spend in the exercise of prayer.—Hooker.
Leave not off praying to God: for either praying will make thee leave off sinning; or continuing in sin will make thee desist from praying.—Fuller.
Let our prayers, like the ancient sacrifices, ascend morning and evening; let our days begin and end with God.—Channing.
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpressed,
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.
—Montgomery.
If He prayed who was without sin, how much more it becometh a sinner to pray!—St. Cyprian.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.—Emerson.