“What is reading but silent conversation.”
Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversations
Source: Imaginary Conversations
Wartime Prayers
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)
Context: Prayers offered in times of peace are silent conversations,
Appeals for love, or love's release, in private invocationsBut all that is changed now.
Gone like a memory from the day before the fires.
People hungry for the voice of God
Hear lunatics and liars.Wartime prayers. Wartime prayers
In every language spoken.
For every family scattered and broken.
“What is reading but silent conversation.”
Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversations
Source: Imaginary Conversations
“Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)
Remark at a cabinet meeting, as quoted in Since 1945 : Politics and Diplomacy in Recent American History (1979) by Robert A. Divine, p. 55
1950s
“The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.”
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer
L’homme qui nous parle est l’amant, l’homme qui ne nous parle plus est le mari.
Part I, ch. VII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam
Kanzul `Ummal, Volume 7, Tradition 18897
Shi'ite Hadith
“Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God.”
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist
The Efficacy of Prayer (1958)
Context: Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate. It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.” Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam
Biharul Anwar, Volume 82, Page 202
Shi'ite Hadith
Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam
He then said: "The divide between a believer and disbelief is the abandonment of prayers."
Biharul Anwar, Volume 82, Page 202
Shi'ite Hadith