“Pray, pray be composed, and do not betray what you feel to every body present”
Source: Sense and Sensibility
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Jane Austen 477
English novelist 1775–1817Related quotes

“You should pray for a sound mind in a sound body.”
Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
X, line 356; see mens sana in corpore sano.
Variant translation: One should pray to have a sound mind in a sound body.
Satires, Satire X

"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.

“If you do not pray to God, what is that to Him? It is only your misfortune.”
Women Saints of East and West

“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.”

“I looked into her eyes. "Mom, who do you pray to?"
I just pray, Daniel. That's all.”
Source: The Dangerous Days of Daniel X

Reported in Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865–1915 (1940), p. 418, footnote. Another source states: "The celebrated anecdote... is not so unambiguous as it appears... There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Hale's reply, but it should be understood within a framework of respect for the senators as well as concern for the country. He knew every one of them personally and regarded them, as he said in his preface to Prayers in The Senate (1904), as 'intelligent men, in very close daily intimacy with each other, in the discharge of a common duty of the greatest importance.'" John R. Adams, Edward Everett Hale (1977), pp. 100–101.
Disputed

Journals and Papers X4A 435
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s


“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one”