The most common cause of unanswered prayer is prayerlessness.

souls without prayer are like people whose bodies or limbs are paralysed: they possess feet and hands but they cannot control them.

Prayer busters (causes of unanswered prayer) are prayerlessness, unconfessed sin, unresolved relational conflict, selfishness, uncaring attitudes, and inadequate faith.

Sensing the carelessness and one-sidedness of our prayers, we start to feel guilty about praying. Guilt leads to faint-heartedness and that in turn leads to prayerlessness.

One reason we stop praying or let our prayer lives fade is that we are too comfortable.

Out-of-balance praying leads to no praying at all!

I was recently told by a great theologian that souls without prayer are like bodies, palsied and lame, having hands and feet they cannot use.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

The soul that reduces prayer to the minimum remains asphyxiated; if it excludes all invocation, it is slowly strangled.

"The good deeds of one who, without any appropriate excuse does not offer his prayer until its time passes away, are annulled." He then said: "The divide between a believer and disbelief is the abandonment of prayers."

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.

Whoever knows the world as something to be utilized knows God the same way. His prayers are a way of unburdening himself– and fall into the ears of the void. He– and not the 'atheist' who from the night and longing of his garret window addresses the nameless– is godless.

I don't pray because it doesn't work. Prayer doesn't fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.