Selected quotes of Pope Benedict XVI offered daily for prayer and reflection….

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Prayer
 


To pray is not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner of happiness. When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well.

 
Encyclical Letter
'Spe Salvi'

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Prayer is an inner attitude before being a series of practices or formulas; it is a manner of being in God's presence before the carrying out of acts of worship or speaking words.

 
General Audience
St Peter's Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Only in God who reveals himself does man’s seeking find complete fulfillment. The prayer that is openness and elevation of the heart to God, thus becomes a personal relationship with him. And even if man forgets his Creator, the living, true God does not cease to call man first to the mysterious encounter of prayer.

 
General Audience
St Peter's Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Humanity bears within it a thirst for the infinite, a yearning for eternity, a search for beauty, a desire for love, a need for light and truth, which impel us toward the Absolute. We carry within us the desire for God. In some way, we know that we can turn to God; that we can pray to Him. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of history, defined prayer as 'the expression of humanity's desire for God’.

 
General Audience
St Peters Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of history, defines prayer as “an expression of man’s desire for God”. This attraction to God, which God himself has placed in man, is the soul of prayer, that then takes on a great many forms, in accordance with the history, the time, the moment, the grace and even the sin of every person praying. Man’s history has in fact known various forms of prayer, because he has developed different kinds of openness to the “Other” and to the Beyond, so that we may recognize prayer as an experience present in every religion and culture.

 
General Audience
St. Peter's Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Man bears within him a thirst for the infinite, a longing for eternity, a quest for beauty, a desire for love, a need for light and for truth which impel him towards the Absolute; man bears within him the desire for God. And man knows, in a certain way, that he can turn to God, he knows he can pray to him.

 
General Audience
St Peter's Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Prayer has one of its typical expressions in the gesture of kneeling. It is a gesture that has in itself a radical ambivalence. In fact, I can be forced to kneel — a condition of indigence and slavery — but I can also kneel spontaneously, declaring my limitations and therefore my being in need of Another. To him, I declare I am weak, needy, ‘a sinner’.

 
General Audience
St. Peter's Square
11 May 2011

 
 
 
Prayer
 


Let us love being with the Lord! There we can speak with him about everything. We can offer him our petitions, our concerns, our troubles. Our joys. Our gratitude, our disappointments, our needs and our aspirations.

 
Homily at Vespers
Basilica of Saint Anne
Altötting, Germany
11 September 2006

 

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