William Gurnall Quotes

If you pray more you will pray better.

Prayer requires more of the heart than of the tongue.

The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light praying makes light preaching.

Look to it that you do not try to do all of it, do not try to do too much, lest your spirit grow weary. Besides, a good prayer mustn't be too long. Do not draw it out. Prayer ought to be frequent and fervent.

It is not a matter of time so much as a matter of heart; if you have the heart to pray, you will find the time.

A man who prays much in private will make short prayers in public.

The test is the sixty seconds of every minute, and the sixty minutes of every hour, not our times of prayer and devotional meetings.

prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and the art of prayer.

If you want to pray better, you have to pray more.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.

Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other.

Prayer is a trade to be learned. We must be apprentices and serve our time at it. Painstaking care, much thought, practice and labour are required to be a skillful tradesman in praying. Practice in this, as well as in all other trades, makes perfect.

What is the reason that some believers are so much brighter and holier than others? I believe the difference, in nineteen cases out of twenty, arises from different habits about private prayer. I believe that those who are not eminently holy pray little, and those who are eminently holy pray much.

They, therefore, who are hasty in their devotions and think a little will do, are strangers both to the nature of devotion and the nature of man; they do not know that they are to learn to pray, and that prayer is to be learnt as they learn other things, by frequency, constancy, and perseverance.

As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer.

If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, He will be in the last place the remainder of the day.

The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint

Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.

Those who pray from the heart do not think about the prayer they are saying, but about the God to whom they pray.

Prayer is to the Christian what breath is to life, yet no duty of the Christian is so neglected.

It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.

He who is too busy to pray will be too busy to live a holy life. Satan had rather we let the grass grow on the path to our prayer chamber than anything else.

There are two principal points of attention necessary for the preservation of this constant spirit of prayer which unites us with God; we must continually seek to cherish it, and we must avoid everything that tends to make us lose it.

A severe apprenticeship in the trade of praying must be served in order to become a journeyman in it.