Do not be upset if you do not immediately receive what you asked God to give you. The Lord wants to give you greater things than you have even thought to pray for – to teach you to persevere in prayer.
–Evagrius Ponticus (345-399)
How lovely is prayer, and how radiant are its works. Prayer is acceptable to God when it goes with good deeds, and it is heard when it rises out of a spirit of forgiveness. Prayer is always answered when it is pure and sincere. Prayer is powerful when it is suffused with God’s vigor.
–Saint Aphrahat the Persian (270-345)
If, in the course of your prayers, you feel a special joy or are moved in the heart by something, then stay with it for a while.
–Saint John Climacus (c. 525-606)
We should go to prayer with deep humility and an awareness of our nothingness. We must invoke the help of the Holy Spirit and that of our good angel, and then remain still in God’s presence, full of faith that he is more in us than we are in ourselves.
–Saint Jane Frances de Chantal (1572-1641)
Length of prayer consists, not in praying for many things, but in the affections persisting in the desire of one thing.
–Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
For this is what Scripture is – its words are words of eternal life, and it is written not just so that we should believe, but specially so that we should possess eternal life in which we may see, and love, and have all our desires fulfilled. When they are fulfilled, then we shall know the superabundant love that comes from knowledge, and so we shall be filled with all the fullness of God.
–Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274)
