Quotes from E. M. Bounds

Prayer is of transcendent importance. Prayer is the mightiest agent to advance God's work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God's work. Prayer succeeds when all else fails.

God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. They outlive the lives of those who uttered them.

Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from God if they lived more obedient and well-pleasing to God.

Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.

It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer that the life-giving fire descends for none but the earnest man gets access to the ear of God.

By prayer the ability is secured to feel the law of love to speak according to the law of love and to do everything in harmony with the law of love.

The possibilities of prayer are found in its allying itself with the purposes of God for God's purposes and man's praying are the combination of all potent and omnipotent forces.

Non-praying is lawlessness discord anarchy.

Prayer honors God acknowledges His being exalts His power adores His providence secures His aid.

Prayer puts God's work in His hands-and keeps it there.

It is hard to wait and press and pray and hear no voice but stay till God answers.

Prayer is our most formidable weapon the thing which makes all else we do efficient.

Prayer is the language of a man burdened with a sense of need.

Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God's footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point when we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.

We can do nothing without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer. It surmounts or removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and gains its ends in the face of invincible hindrances.

Faith, and hope, and patience and all the strong, beautiful, vital forces of piety are withered and dead in a prayerless life. The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom, and fruitage in prayer.

The goal of prayer is the ear of God, a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.

Prayer is a trade to be learned. We must be apprentices and serve our time at it. Painstaking care, much thought, practice and labour are required to be a skillful tradesman in praying. Practice in this, as well as in all other trades, makes perfect.

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter of prayer; but a capacity for faith, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one's self in God's glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God.

The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be; the mightier the forces against evil everywhere.

Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd our prayer. "Choked to death" would be the coroner's verdict in many cases of dead praying if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity.

I feel it is far better to begin with God, to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another. In general it is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in anything else.

Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer.

Praying which does not result in pure conduct is a delusion. We have missed the whole office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify conduct. It is in the very nature of things that we must quit praying, or quit bad conduct.