“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.”
"Going up to Jerusalem", Twenty Sermons (1886), p. 330.
Context: O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.
Talking to his son James http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/11/04/fear_and_strength.html on the night of his landslide victory over Herbert Hoover (8 November 1932), as quoted in Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008) by H. W. Brands
1930s
“Pray, pray be composed, and do not betray what you feel to every body present”
Source: Sense and Sensibility
“We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.”
Source: Les Misérables
“You pray for yourselves and just ask God to guide you and to give you strength.”
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 46
De Flagello myrteo. xiii.
“To pray is to think about the meaning of life.”
Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
