“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

— Thomas Merton

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone." by Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton photo

Thomas Merton 92

Priest and author 1915–1968

Related quotes

“Meditation is earnest prayer, and when prayer progresses, it becomes true meditation.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: The Call of Sedona: Journey of the Heart

“Any heart turned Godward feels more joy
In one short hour of prayer, than e'er was raised
By all the feasts of earth since its foundation.”

Philip James Bailey Festus

Festus (1839)

“Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Quoted by Alvin Redman in The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde http://books.google.com/books?id=qUjQAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Prayer+must+never+be+answered+if+it+is+it+ceases+to+be+prayer+and+becomes+correspondence%22&pg=PA106#v=onepage (1952)

“Don't let your prayers turn into a wish list for Santa Claus. Worship God and praise him when you come to him in prayer.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

“We have to let God's love break through the hard crust of our indifference, our spiritual weariness, our blind conformity to the spirit of this age. Only then can we let it ignite our imagination and shape our deepest desires. That is why prayer is so important: daily prayer, private prayer in the quiet of our hearts and before the Blessed Sacrament, and liturgical prayer in the heart of the Church.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Closing Mass (19 July 2008)

“Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Source: A Call to Prayer

“What do I have
to help me, without spell or prayer,
endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous,
the death of love?”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Over, from Rapture (2005).

“He who has ever been confronted with the ultimate and has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced, awaits a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for salvation. For things are not mute. The stillness is full of demands. Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 330
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

“A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages”

Tennessee Williams Stairs to the Roof

This is the subtitle of the play
Source: Stairs to the Roof (1941)

Related topics