Silence is the loudest form of prayer

• The fruit of Silence is Prayer. Mother Teresa
• At the heart of silence is prayer. Mother Teresa
• My greatest weapon is mute prayer. Mahatma Gandhi
• The root of prayer is interior silence. Thomas Keating
• Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. Mother Teresa
• Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust. Patricia Hampl
• Frequently, only silence can express my prayer. Therese of Lisieux
• The seeker’s silence is the loudest form of prayer. Swami Vivekananda
• The silence of prayer is the silence of listening. Elizabeth O’Connor
• A season of silence is the best preparation for speech with God. Samuel Chadwick
• It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called. Henri Nouwen
• Prayer is when you talk to God. Meditation is when you’re listening. Kelsey Grammer
• God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer. Mother Teresa
• Patience, prayer and silence-these are what give strength to the soul. Mary Faustina Kowalska
• The first requirement for prayer is silence. People of prayer are people of silence. Mother Teresa
• Whole days and weeks have I spent prostrate on the ground in silent or vocal prayer. George Whitefield
• The lover of silence draws close to God. He talks to Him in secret and God enlightens him. John Climacus
• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. Mother Teresa
• Be faithful to the time spent in prayer and make sure that at least half of your prayer is spent in silence. Mother Teresa
• The Simple Path Silence is Prayer. Prayer is Faith. Faith is Love. Love is Service. The Fruit of Service is Peace. Mother Teresa
• Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand. Oswald Chambers
• Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul’s language. Fulton J. Sheen
• Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence. Anne Lamott
• The essence of meditation is a period of time set aside to contemplate the Lord, listen to Him, and allow Him to permeate our spirits. Charles Stanley
• Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise. Richard Rohr
• Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own. Jean Vanier
• God has special confidences for each soul. Indeed, it would seem as though the deepest truths came only in moments of profound devotional silence and contemplation. Charles Brent
• If you are rushed for time, sow time and you will reap time. Go to church and spend a quiet hour in prayer. You will have more time than ever and your work will get done. Dorothy Day
• Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love. Amit Ray
• Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi
• I prefer a kind of sweet, deep, rich prayer in which a person goes in and says, Take me down deep into the reason you gave me life. Take me down deep. It silences the chaos in me. Caroline Myss
• To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. Thomas Merton
• The truest prayer begins when we pass beyond word into deep silence, when lips are hushed; when racing thoughts are stilled; when emotions are placid as “the dawning over the waveless ocean. Albert E. Day
• In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. Mahatma Gandhi
• God speaks in the silence of the heart, and we listen. And then we speak to God from the fullness of our heart, and God listens. And this listening and this speaking is what prayer is meant to be. Mother Teresa
• Prayer is like a great love. When you start dating the silence can be awkward, but as you grow to know each other you can sit in silence for hours and just being with each other is a great comfort. Matthew KellyFavorite
• Prayer within breath is silence, love within infinity is silence, Wisdom without word is silence, compassion without aim is silence, action without doer is silence, smiling with all existence is silence. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
• I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence-we need to listen to God because it’s not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters. Mother Teresa
• Where shall we get religion? Beneath the open sky, the sphere of crystal silence surcharged with deity.. The midnight earth sends incense up, sweet with the breath of prayer — Go out beneath the naked night and get religion there. Sam Walter Foss
• When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him. William Barclay
• If I’m going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I’ve got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don’t turn on music or the TV unless I really need to. Richard Rohr
• The real “work” of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing– that demands real effort. Henri Nouwen
• In a world where there is so much noise, so much bewilderment, there is a need for silent adoration of God. Be assiduous in the prayer of adoration and teach it to the faithful. It is a source of comfort and light, particularly to those who are suffering. Pope Benedict XVI
• Silence, as someone has said, is the mother of prayer and the nurse of holy thoughts. Silence cuts down on our sins, doesn’t it? We can’t be sinning in so many different ways if we are being quiet before God. Silence nourishes patience, charity, discretion. Elisabeth Elliot
• As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent… This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard. Soren Kierkegaard
• I have been challenged by the concept of meditation … I decided recently to accept the invitation of a friend to experience the sheer silence of meditation-undirected prayer. … I had before only sensed intellectually … But by going deep into prayer I could almost feel it. Laurie Beth Jones
• In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. Mother Teresa
• Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; that in boundless silence I may grow strong enough to endure and flexible enough to share your grace. Ted Loder
• In place of our exhaustion and spiritual fatigue, God will give us rest. All He asks is that we come to Him…that we spend a while thinking about Him, meditating on Him, talking to Him, listening in silence, occupying ourselves with Him – totally and thoroughly lost in the hiding place of His presence. Charles R. Swindoll
• When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer. Thomas Merton
• In listening you are not waiting for anything – there is just a field of pure attention. That is a much deeper prayer than any words. True prayer is where prayer also becomes meditation.  Not even wanting an answer, it’s enough to be in the silence.  Sometimes an answer comes, or the thing becomes resolved, sometimes, suddenly. Listen.  Eckhart Tolle
• The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing. Annie Dillard
• The soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father; the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and the moment the mind is released from the task upon which it is engaged, it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest. Edward McKendree Bounds
• The disciplines of prayer, silence, and contemplation as practiced by the monastics and mystics are precisely that – stopping the noise, slowing down, and becoming still so that God can break through all our activity and noise to speak to us. Prayer serves to put all parts of our lives in God’s presence, reminding us how holy our humanity really is. Jim Wallis
• We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation. Mother Teresa
• The beginning of prayer is silence. If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks. And to be able to see that silence, to be able to hear God we need a clean heart; for a clean heart can see God, can hear God, can listen to God; and then only from the fullness of our heart can we speak to God. But we cannot speak unless we have listened, unless we have made that connection with God in the silence of our heart. Mother Teresa
• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noises and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature-trees, flowers, grass-grow in silence. Is not our mission to give God to those we walk with? Not a dead God, but a living, loving God. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. Words that don’t give the light of Christ increase the darkness. Mother Teresa
• The highest level of prayer is not a prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know Him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from an insane world order. We pray that He might flood our minds. Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts. Marianne Williamson

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…for prayer is about listening to God

• True listening is obedient listening. To listen to God is to obey Him. Leanne Payne
• God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer. Mother Teresa
• If you would have God hear you when you pray, you must hear him when he speaks. Richard J. Needham
• The value of consistent prayer is not that God will hear us, but that we will hear Him. William McGill
• If you do all the talking when you pray, how will you ever hear God’s answers? Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Listen in silence because if your heart is full of other things you cannot hear the voice of God. Mother Teresa
• The real ‘work’ of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. Henri Nouwen
• The beginning of prayer is silence. If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks. Mother Teresa
• When you pray be sure that you listen as well as talk. You have things you want to say to God but He also has things He wants to say to you. Joyce Meyer
• Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts. Mother Teresa
• To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say. Madeleine L’Engle
• God’s silences are His answers. If we only take as answers those that are visible to our senses, we are in a very elementary condition of grace. Oswald Chambers
• I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen. Terry Tempest Williams
• While praying, listen to the words very carefully. When your heart is attentive, your entire being enters your prayer without your having to force it. Nachman of Breslov
• Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue; God’s voice is its most essential part. Listening to God’s voice is the secret of the assurance that He will listen to mine. Andy Murray
• You have to listen to the one who calls you beloved. That has to be affirmed over and over again. That is prayer – listening to the voice of the one who calls you “the beloved.” Henri Nouwen
• God speaks in the silence of the heart, and we listen. And then we speak to God from the fullness of our heart, and God listens. And this listening and this speaking is what prayer is meant to be. Mother Teresa
• To pray is to listen to the One who calls you ‘my beloved daughter,’ ‘my beloved son,’ ‘my beloved child.’ To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being. Henri Nouwen
• The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly. Mahatma Gandhi
• Prayer is spiritual communication between man and God, a two-way relationship in which man should not only talk to God but also listen to Him. Prayer to God is like a child’s conversation with his father. It is natural for a child to ask his father for the things he needs. Billy Graham
• When a warrior is present and awake to all that she is, she is able to take on any challenge, any project, or any future that she desires. Her daily prayer is to have the strength to love all of herself, the courage to listen to what she is guided to do and the confidence to go out, stand tall and deliver her gifts to the world. Debbie Ford
• In listening you are not waiting for anything – there is just a field of pure attention. That is a much deeper prayer than any words. True prayer is where prayer also becomes meditation.  Not even wanting an answer, it’s enough to be in the silence.  Sometimes an answer comes, or the thing becomes resolved, sometimes, suddenly. Listen.  Eckhart Tolle
• It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him. William Barclay
• There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God.  He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.  Frederick William Faber
• Help” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray–with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, “Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom. Anne Lamott
• We are trying not so much to make God listen to us as to make ourselves listen to him; we are trying not to persuade God to do what we want, but to find out what he wants us to do. It so often happens that in prayer we are really saying, ‘Thy will be changed,’ when we ought to be saying, ‘Thy will be done.’ The first object of prayer is not so much to speak to God as to listen to him. William Barclay

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Pray by becoming an alert field of attention

• To be present is to be prayerful. Rajneesh
• Prayer can gradually become listening to God rather than talking to God. What does listening mean? Listening means there is a field of bare, pure attention.  Listening does not mean that you are waiting for some answer, because then you are not really listening.  In listening you are not waiting for anything – there is just a field of pure attention.   Eckhart Tolle
• There come times when I have nothing more to tell God. If I were to continue to pray in words, I would have to repeat what I have already said. At such times it is wonderful to say to God, “May I be in Thy presence, Lord? I have nothing more to say to Thee, but I do love to be in Thy presence.” Hallesby

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Prayer and meditation are complimentary

• Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own. Madame de Stael
• Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God. Diana Robinson

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Pray from the heart for your feelings are more important than the words

• Prayers not felt by us are seldom heard by God. Philip Henry
• Prayer requires more of the heart than the tongue. Adam Clarke
• Cold prayers shall never have any warm answers. Thomas Brooks
• Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. Mahatma Gandhi
• May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in. Mother Teresa
• In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. John Bunyan
• When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart. John Bunyan
• Groanings which cannot be uttered are often prayers which cannot be refused. Charles H. Spurgeon
• Prayer is essentially about making the heart strong so that fear cannot penetrate there. Matthew Fox
• God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked. Voltaire
• When I worship, I would rather my heart be without words than my words be without heart. LaMar Boschman
• Prayer is not so much an act as it is an attitude – an attitude of dependency, dependency upon God. Arthur W. Pink
• Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, silent remembering and pure intention raises the heart to that supreme Power. Amit Ray
• The reason why we obtain no more in prayer is because we expect no more. God usually answers us according to our own hearts. Richard Alleine
• Prayer is the song of the heart. It reaches the ear of God even if it is mingled with the cry and the tumult of a thousand men. Khalil Gibran
• It is not eloquence, but earnestness, not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but compunction of soul. Hannah More
• I’ve often thought, I’m nobody. Why would God answer my prayer? But God’s not impressed by eloquence; he’s impressed by our longing for him. Stormie Omartian
• …True prayer is measured by weight, not by length. A single groan before God may have more fullness of prayer in it than a fine oration of great length. Charles Spurgeon
• The easiest way to get touch with this universal power is through silent Prayer. Shut your eyes, shut your mouth, and open your heart. This is the golden rule of prayer. Prayer should be
• Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi
• In essence, prayer is communion with mystery. And for that reason, there can be no one right way to do it, no prescription for prayer that will minister to everyone’s needs. However, perhaps there is one requisite: that our heart be in it. Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins

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Pray with love

• It is good to love God for hope of reward, but it is better to love God for love’s sake; and the prayer goes: O Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth. But grant me this, that I may love thee without the hope of reward ‘love’ unselfishly for love’s sake. Swami Vivekananda
• Prayer is an act of love; words are not needed. Teresa of Avila
• For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy. Therese of Lisieux