Unanswered Prayers Quotes

The hardest thing about praying hard is enduring unanswered prayers. If you don't guard your heart, unresolved anger toward God can undermine faith. ~ Mark Batterson

Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art. ~ Peter Akinti

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. ~ Truman Capote

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. ~ Garth Brooks

Character is both developed and revealed by tests, and all of life is a test ... You will be tested by major changes, delayed promises, impossible problems, unanswered prayers, undeserved criticism, and even senseless tragedies. ~ Rick Warren

Be sure that someday you'll praise and thank God for your unanswered prayers that once you had wept for them. ~ Shams Tabrizi

i share a legacy
with the sky
we both know how to carry
some unanswered prayers
and some unshed tears
{the sky & i} ~ Noor Unnahar

There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers. ~ Saint Teresa Of Avila

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth. ~ Jim Carroll

It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody's out there. ~ Mitch Albom

At times, it can feel like the loneliest place on Earth, because it's just us. Alone with our unanswered prayers ~ Suzanne Elizabeth Anderson

He so tempers the outcome of events according to his incomprehensible plan that the prayers of the saints, which are a mixture of faith and error, are not nullified."185 ~ Timothy J. Keller

It's a big world. Don't get trapped by tiny dreams and feeble problems. Time for big prayers and bold faith. ~ Louie Giglio

Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [ ... ] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29). ~ Peter Kreeft

Some of my earliest and fondest memories of my mother are of her kneeling at the side of per bed every night and praying. As a child, I would always get very close to her as she prayed. I would put my ear as close as I could to her mouth and try my best to hear what she was saying to God, but I never could make out the words. Today, being married to an addict myself, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what she was praying. ~ Barbara Bice

How shall I get through the months or years of my future life, in company with that man
my greatest enemy
for none could injure me as he has done? Oh! when I think how fondly, how foolishly I have loved him, how madly I have trusted him, how constantly I have laboured, and studied, and prayed, and struggled for his advantage, and how cruelly he has trampled on my love, betrayed my trust, scorned my prayers and tears, and efforts for his preservation
crushed my hopes, destroyed my youth's best feelings, and doomed me to a life of hopeless misery
as far as man can do it
it is not enough to say that I no longer love my husband
I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him
I hate him! ~ Anne Bronte

...the postwar revolution in America's religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower's inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase "freedom under God." As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most - not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration in Washington. ~ Kevin M. Kruse

All my work, all my efforts, all my prayers and tears are for humanity, and the spread of peace and love among mankind. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Today, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. - Richard J. Foster, Prayers from the Heart12 ~ Richard J. Foster

When we shoot an arrow, we look to the fall of it; when we send a ship to sea, we look for its return; and when we sow seed, we look for a harvest; so likewise when we sow our prayers, through Christ, in God's bosom, shall we not look for an answer and observe how we speed? It is a seed of atheism to pray and not to look how we speed. But a sincere Christian will pray and wait, and strengthen his heart with promises out of the Word, and never leave praying and looking up till God gives him a gracious answer. ~ Richard Sibbes

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. ~ J.I. Packer

He who neglects to pray alone and in private, however assiduously he frequents public meetings, there gives his prayers to the wind. ~ John Calvin

If our prayer is "Dear God, please use me to be of service," then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God's love. ~ Marianne Williamson

You and Merrin's mother-have you really been praying for me to die?" "More or less," Mould said. "To be honest, most of the time when she's calling to God, she's riding my dick." "Do you know why He hasn't struck me down?" Ig asked. "Do you know why God hasn't answered your prayers?" "Why?" "Because there is no God. Your prayers are whispers to an empty room." ..."Bullshit." "It's all a lie. There's never been anyone there. ~ Joe Hill

Ten thousand people were baptized in the Han river in Seoul, Korea. Imagine! 10,000 people giving their lives to Christ at one time! I will never forget it! ----I felt that the constant prayers of the Korean people had made the difference. I think we in the west should take prayer more seriously. ~ Helen Goldie

God looks not at the oratory of your prayers, how elegant they may be; nor at the geometry of your prayers, how long they may be; nor at the arithmetic of your prayers, how many they may be; not at logic of your prayers, how methodical they may be; but the sincerity of them he looks at. ~ Thomas Brooks

For those who want to pray for me to "find God," please don't waste your prayers. If you really think God is listening to you, then please use those precious moments to ask God to care for the sick and dying, and leave me out of it. I'm happy without my faith and with living my life in the here and now. Besides, thousands before you have prayed for me to find God and it hasn't worked yet. Why would God value your request over theirs? ~ David G. McAfee

We are not to mimic witches spicing their caldrons with a little eye of newt and tail of squirrel when we add Jesus' name to our prayers. ~ Bryan Chapell

Are we willing to shun vain repetition and keep our prayers out of an unchallenging rut by asking God to make us more sensitive to our own sin? ~ John Pereira

The battle for our lives, and the lives and souls of our children, our husbands, our friends, our families, our neighbors, and our nation is waged on our knees. When we don't pray, it's like sitting on the sidelines watching those we love and care about scrambling through a war zone, getting shot at from every angle. When we do pray, however, we're in the battle alongside them, approaching God's power on their behalf. If we also declare the Wordog God in our prayers, then we wield a powerful weapon against which no enemy can prevail. ~ Stormie O'martian

The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered. ~ Pope John Paul II

Prayer, the basic exercise of the spirit, must be actively practiced in our private lives. The neglected soul of the human being must be made strong enough to assert itself once more. For if the power of prayer is again released and used in the lives of common men and women; if the spirit declares its aims clearly and boldly, there is yet hope that our prayers for a better world will be answered. ~ Alexis Carrel

I cannot love thee; thou 'rt worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers, child, and ask God's pardon. I doubt thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee! ~ Emily Bronte

Astrological prayers seem to me to be built on as good reason as the predictions. ~ Benjamin Stillingfleet

Daily fervent prayers seeking forgiveness and special help and direction are essential to our lives and the nourishment of our testimonies. When we become hurried, repetitive, casual, or forgetful in our prayers, we tend to lose the closeness of the Spirit, which is so essential in the continual direction we need to successfully manage the challenges of our everyday lives. Family prayer every morning and night adds additional blessings and power to our individual prayers and to our testimonies. ~ Donald L. Staheli

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair. ~ Mark Twain

You cannot pray at home, like you can at church, where there is a great multitude; where exclamations are cried out to God as from one great heart, and where there is something more: the unions of minds, the accord of souls, the bond of charity, the prayers of priests. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

Gabriela was in prison for Judaizing, but she recited the prayers of her tormentors. She had not even the comfort of the religion for which she was punished. ~ David Liss

What I've learned the more time I've spent following Jesus is that God delights in answering our impossible prayers. ~ Bob Goff

It's the unanswered questions that makes it worth getting up in the morning. ~ Stephen King

May the river be; may the fish live. May the river not dry up and may the fish not die. We shall not shiver; we shall not quake. When the bush is burning, may we run out to the road; and when the road is burning, may we run into the bush. We shall see that which we shall eat; whatever will eat us will not see us. Whatever will profit us, if it is inside the ground, it will germinate; if it is in the water, it will float. The source through which enmity comes our way shall turn to the source of our joy. ~ Azuka Onwuka

The savage prays to a stone that he calls a god, while the Christian prays to a god he calls a spirit, and the prayers of both are equally useful. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The following two examples bear witness to the same state of mind: a certain believer asks God for various favors not because he wishes to obtain them but "to obey the divine command" expressed in the Koran - as if in commanding or permitting personal prayer God was not considering the ends of this prayer and as if He could appreciate a form of obedience that disregarded the sufficient reason for the act commanded or permitted! In this case "command" is actually a rather grand word, for in reality God does not command us to have needs or make requests of Him but rather invites us out of mercy to ask Him for what we lack; we can pray for our daily bread or for a cure just as we can pray for inward graces, but there is no question of praying for the sake of praying because God ordered for the sake of ordering. The second example is the following: another believer, unlike the first, begins with the idea that everything is predestined, and he therefore abstains from formulating any prayers, in spite of the "divine command" this time, because "everything that must happen will happen anyway" - as if God would give Himself the trouble of commanding or permitting superfluous attitudes and as if prayer too were not predestined! ~ Frithjof Schuon

Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation. ~ Ivars Peterson

I've always wondered how much can you do for your fellow man if your hands are constantly stuck together in Prayers for them? ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Olga noticed Mirium looking at her blankly. 'Don't you pray?' she asked.
'Pray?' Mirium shook her head. 'I don't understand - '
'Prayers! Oh, yes, I forgot. Didn't dear Roland say that on the other side everybody is pagan? You all worship some dead god on a stick, impaled or something disgusting, and pray in English,' she said with relish. ~ Charles Stross

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? ~ Thomas Merton

This is a horrific day in Boston. My thoughts and prayers are with those who have been injured. ~ Deval Patrick

A prayerful life is not a life in which we say many prayers, but a life in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is done, said, or understood independently of him who is the origin and purpose of our existence. ~ Henri Nouwen

Men and women are needed whose prayers will give to the world the utmost power of God; who will make His promises to blossom with rich and full results. God is waiting to hear us and challenges us to bring Him to do this thing by our praying. He is asking us, to-day, as He did His ancient Israel, to prove Him now herewith." Behind God's Word is God Himself, and we read: "Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, his Maker: Ask of me of things to come and concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands, command ye me." As though God places Himself in the hands and at the disposal of His people who pray - as indeed He does. The dominant element of all praying is faith, that is conspicuous, cardinal and emphatic. Without such faith it is impossible to please God, and equally impossible to pray. ~ E. M. Bounds

Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street. ~ Chaim Potok

Chocolate. The food of the gods, as my grandma used to call it. And I totally agree. It's the answer to prayers. Emotional relief. A form of currency. An aphrodisiac. Raw and dark. White and saccharine. Milky sweet. Mouthwatering. It's all good; I don't discriminate. ~ K.K. Allen