August 21

Fruitful prayer is a restoration within your consciousness of the highest understanding of the meaning of your life that you have reached in your best minutes.

1

Prayer, understood as inner formal worship, and therefore as a means of obtaining favor for yourself, is a superstitious error. For that is nothing other than a declared desire in relation to a Being that needs no declarations. In essence, we do nothing with such prayer and do not fulfill any of the duties that we have been assigned as God’s commandments, and, consequently, we do not really serve God.

A heartfelt desire to be useful to God in everything we do—or, to put it another way, to ensure that the fulfillment of all our actions is accompanied by a feeling of being at the service of God—that is what the spirit of prayer consists in, which can and must unfailingly dwell within us. But to clothe this desire in words and formulas (even internally)—the most this can do is act as a means of reviving such a sentiment in ourselves.

— Kant

2

If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

— Matthew 5:23–24

3

Sometimes one wants to complain like a child to someone (God), to ask for help. Is this a good feeling? No—it is weakness and unbelief. That which looks most like faith—prayer of supplication—is actually unbelief, unbelief in the fact that evil does not exist, that there is nothing to ask for, that if you feel bad, then it is only an indication to you that you should work on yourself, that the thing that is happening is exactly what should be happening, and that you should do what you must.

4

In praying, do not use vain repetitions as the pagans do; for they think that they will be heard for their much speaking. Therefore do not be like them, for your Father knows what things you need before you ask him.

— Matthew 6:7–8

5

An hour of honest, serious contemplation is more valuable than weeks of enthusiastic adoration, when adoration does not manifest into deeds.

— Harrison

6

Devotion to the will of God—a necessary condition of Christian life—excludes the possibility of specific desires and therefore of supplication, of praying for something to happen.

Pray every hour. The most necessary and the most difficult prayer is to remember amid the movement of life about your duties before God and his law. You are afraid, angry, confused, carried away: recall who you are and what you should be doing. That is what prayer is. It is difficult at first, but it is possible to make it a habit.