Prayer for Beginners Quotes

“Indifference is more truly the opposite of love than hate is, for we can both love and hate the same person at the same time, but we cannot both love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“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, Prayer for Beginners

“Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov).”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“One moment of prayer, of weak worship, confused contrition, tepid thanksgiving, or pitiful petition will bring us closer to God than all the books of theology in the world.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [...] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“We pray to obey God, not to 'play God'. We pray, not to change God's mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to 'let God be God'. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask (Mt. 7:7).”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin!”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“We try too much and trust too little. Count the times God's Book tells us to" try. "Now count the times it tells us to" trust.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Feelings are wonderful decorations, but they are not a foundation to build on.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“One common cause of this mistake of preferring to imagine and admire a great ideal instead of beginning to do little deeds is our impatience with little baby steps, our lack of humility.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“God wants us to worry about our sinsbeforewe sin; the devil wants us to worryafterwe sin. God wants us to feel free after we repent (for we really are free then); the devil is a deceiver). The devil tempts us to cavalier pride before we sin and worrisome despair afterward, since pride and despair both separate us from God, and anything that separates us from God is the devil's friend and our enemy, while anything that brings us close to God is the devil's enemy and our friend.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Feelings, like waves, look more substantial than they are.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Léon Bloy wrote: 'Life holds only one tragedy: not to have been a saint”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“But if he had come down from the Cross, he would have made itimpossiblefor them to believe in him, for he would have substituted sight for faith. That is why he does not take us down from our crosses: so that we do not substitute feelings and experiences for faith. He wants the very best for us, the strongest and most precious gift, and that is faith.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“It is true, as John Bunyan said, that God infinitely prefers a heart without words to words without a heart when we pray.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“What our Heavenly Father wants us to do about our spiritual failures is like what our earthly father wants us to do about our earthly failures. When we fall off the horse, or the bike, or the high road to Heaven, we must simply climb on again as soon as we are aware of the fact that we have fallen off, rather than sitting there stewing in self-pity or self-hatred.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Our conversation with God should be utterly free and familiar, because God is the only person who will never, ever misunderstand us and never, ever reject us (hate us, ignore us, or be indifferent to us). These are the tow reasons we hid from other people, even our friends, even our parents, and the tow reasons we should never hide from God.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“We are not free to love God insofar as we are enslaved to creatures. And we all are. We are addicted to whatever we cannot part with that is less than God, our true good. And that includes ourselves--especially ourselves and our own will. So we must renounce this too, this especially. God's world is not the problem; our attitude is. God does not want us to renounce the unspeakably beautiful world he gave us as creation, as gift, as it really is. He wants us to renounce it as creator, as our god, as it really is not. This wonderful world is our God-given house to live in and to live the love of God in. But God's bride must learn not to love her house as if it were her husband.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“with every choice we move either closer to God or farther away from him.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“When we pray, instead of trying to produce love in our souls toward God, we should be basking in God's love for us. How foolish to stay indoors in the cold, dark little room off the self, trying to turn on the light and turn up the heat, when we can just go outside into God's glorious Sonlight and receive his rays! How silly to fuss with artificial tanning salons and lotions and lights when the Son is out!”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Prayer is easier than we think. we want to think it is too hard or too high and holy for us, because that gives us an excuse for not doing it. This is false humility. We can all do it, even the most sinful, shallow, silly, and stupid of us.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“There is something in us that fears prayer as a maggot fears light. We must do violence to this voice, for it is not ourselves. It is our Enemy.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“Three reasons God commands us to pray correlate to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul:prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart.'The true, the good, and the beautiful' are the three things we need and love the most, because they are the three attributes of God.”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners