Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/466

458 Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold upon God's willingness. —.

Prayer is the act by which man, detaching himself from the embarrassments of sense and nature, ascends to the true level of his destiny. —.

Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness. —.

Prayer is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but compunction of soul. —.

Prayer, then, does not consist in sweet feelings, nor in the charms of an excited imagination, nor in that illumination of the intellect that traces with ease the sublimest truths of God; nor even in a certain consolation in the view of God; all these things are external gifts from His hand, in the absence of which love may exist even more purely, as the soul may then attach itself immediately and solely to God, instead of to His mercies. —.

Prayer is the pulse of the renewed soul; and the constancy of its beat is the test and measure of the spiritual life. —.

The best and sweetest flowers of paradise God gives to His people when they are upon their knees. Prayer is the gate of heaven. —.