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
God is always willing for us to hit the mark when He directs our arrows. When He teaches us to wrestle, He then intends we should prevail. Spiritual breathings are attended with spiritual blessings. Nothing will ascend to heaven but what came down from heaven. That prayer meets with no answer which is not offered up in faith.
Evil company, commonly termed goodfellows - but indeed the devil's chief instruments to hinder a wretched sinner from repentance and piety. The first sign of God's favor to a sinner is to give him grace to forsake evil companions. https://gracegems.org/24/practice_of_piety4.htm
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
Whosoever, therefore, in years of discretion, brings not forth good works after he is called, cannot be saved; neither was he ever predestinated to life eternal.The Practice of Piety
Keep thy speech as clean from all obscenity as thou wouldst thy meat from poison, and let thy talk be gracious, that he who hears thee may grow better by thee. And be ever more earnest when thou speakest of religion than when thou talkest of worldly matters. If thou perceivest that thou hast erred, persevere not in thine error; rejoice to find the truth and magnify it. Study, therefore, three things especially—to understand well, to say well, and to do well.