Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

An unschooled man who knows how to meditate upon the Lord has learned far more than the man with the highest education who does not know how to meditate.

Do not try to approach God with your thinking mind. It may only stimulate your intellectual ideas, activities, and beliefs. Try to approach God with your crying heart. It will awaken your soulful, spiritual consciousness.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody's life.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

I deepen my experience of God through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness.

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.

Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.

The more we can give in our silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life.

In vocal prayer we go to God on foot. In meditation we go to God on horseback. In contemplation we go to God in a jet.

I am a man of prayer and meditation. I feel inspiration is of paramount importance. If I can inspire someone, and if that person also can inspire me, then we can do many good things for the betterment of this world.

Prayer has not been a part of my life in the sense that truth has been.

We can learn more in an hour praying, when praying indeed, than from many hours of rigorous study.

Meditation is waiting on God.

For those of you who are seeing the spiritual life, I recommend these four daily practices: Spend time alone each day in receptive silence. When angry, or afflicted with any negative emotion, take time to be alone with God. (Do not talk with people who are angry; they are irrational and cannot be reasoned with. If you or they are angry, it is best to leave and pray.) Visualize God's light each day and send it to someone who needs help. Exercise the body, it is the temple of the soul.

Meditation opens the doors of your inner treasures, what Jesus calls the kingdom of god. Meditation is only a key, and keys are always small things, but they can unlock immense treasures. Everybody is born as a prince or a princess, but gets lost in the blind crowd of beggars.

Let us take a little time to meditate, to think of what we can do to improve our lives and to become better examples of what a Latter-day Saint should be.

The worshipper of energy is too physically energetic to see that he cannot explore certain higher fields until he is still.

I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God.

Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.

Prayer, to the thinking person, is almost inescapable.

You may go on reading any number of books on Meditation. They can only tell you ‘Realize the Self’. The Self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself in yourself.

Give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them and never be content with a superficial knowledge.