Prayer is always essential, but thought is essential, too, because prayer can be just an escape mechanism, almost at times a cry in the dark by people who are desperate and defeated. Prayer must be intelligent, and it is only to those who realize that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost that the answer will be given and the power will come.Spiritual Depression (173)
If you could be brought once to love secret prayer, and to converse feelingly with God in his word, your heaven will begin on earth; you will enjoy more pleasure than in all manner of riches.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.
Do you pray? One of the things that happens in your prayer life is if you think that you gotta earn the favor of God you'll never be a prayer. If you understand the favour of God was granted you in Jesus Christ you'll have a tendency to run to Christ and not from him.Rezweek 2010 Night 1
Our work is not only to alter vicious habits, but to mortify the corrupt natural affections which bred these habits; not only to deny the fulfilling of sinful lusts, but to be full of holy love and desires. Yet even restraining the execution of corrupt lusts, and opposing them by contrary actings, is in many cases like "cutting off a right hand, and plucking out a right eye" (Mat. 5:29-30). The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification: Growing in Holiness by Living in Union with Christ
As a body without a soul, much wood without fire, a bullet in a gun without powder, so are words in prayer without spirit.Commentary on Old/New Testaments 5 - 334
If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.Disciplines of a Godly man
Let me caution you, lest, instead of gaining Christ by your knowledge, you rather lose him, by putting your knowledge in the place of Christ, and trusting on it for your salvation.
Prayer is chiefly a heart-work. God heareth the heart without the mouth, but never heareth the mouth acceptably without the heart. Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification, 202