I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. – Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

It is not eloquence, but earnestness, not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but compunction of soul. – Hannah More, “Prayer,” Practical Piety

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. – W. H. Auden

Let your prayers be humble, short, but energick. – Countess Dowager of Carlisle, Thoughts in the Form of Maxims addressed to Young