Karl Barth Quotes

[Prayer] takes no time, but it occupies all our time.

Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer.

I’ve got to push everything out of mind save the name of Jesus. I say His name over and over again, for as long as fifteen minutes, until I find my soul suspended in what the ancient Celtic Christians called a “thin place”–a state where the boundary between heaven and earth, divine and human, dissolves. You could say that I use the name of Jesus as my koan.

You don't necessarily have to be religious to pray.

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

Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.

I know a lot of people that don't pray or anything, and that's fine - but I need to. I don't even want to call it prayer, I just want to call it talking to something bigger than me.

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 is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire.

The man who prays ceases to be a fool

I pray. Prayer is a time to connect with the divine, but also time, I'm sure, to concentrate one's thoughts, to meditate, and to imagine what might be.

There are some people who, in order not to pray use as an excuse the fact that life is so hectic that it prevents us from praying. This cannot be. Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer. It is not necessary to always be in meditation, nor to consciously experience the sensation that we are talking to God, no matter how nice that would be. What matters is being with Him, living in Him, in His will. To love with a pure heart, to love everybody, especially to live the poor, is a twenty-four hour prayer.

Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. But when praying, we come "underneath," where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent.

Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.

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.

At the heart of silence is prayer. At the heart of prayer is faith. At the heart of faith is life. At the heart of life is service.

Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.

And then, in that regal silence, finally - I began to meditate on (and with) God.

The trouble with our praying is, we just do it as a means of last resort.

A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.

There is no need to get to a place of prayer; pray wherever you are.

Prayer is a concentration of positive thoughts.

I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.