Top 90 E.M. Bounds Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use – men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men – men of prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

2. “Around us is a world lost in sin, above us is a God willing and able to save; it is ours to build the bridge that links heaven and earth, and prayer is the mighty instrument that does the work.”

— E.M. Bounds

3. “Prayer gives us eyes to see God. Prayer is seeing God.”

— E.M. Bounds

4. “All the true revivals have been born in prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

5. “Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.”

— E.M. Bounds

6. “Our eyes should be taken off self, removed from our own weakness and allowed to rest implicitly upon God’s strength.”

— E.M. Bounds

7. “The preacher is commissioned to pray as well as to preach. His mission is incomplete if he does not do both well.”

— E.M. Bounds

8. “Prayer is the outstretched arms of the child for the Father’s help.”

— E.M. Bounds

9. “To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing which it takes more time to learn. – The Power of Prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

10. “God is vitally concerned that men should pray. Men are bettered by prayer, and the world is bettered by praying. God does His best work for the world through prayer. God’s greatest glory and man’s highest good are secured by prayer. Prayer forms the godliest men and makes the godliest world.”

— E.M. Bounds

11. “The lazy man does not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy. Paul calls it a striving, an agony.”

— E.M. Bounds

12. “Few Christians have anything but a vague idea of the power of prayer; fewer still have any experience of that power. The Church seems almost wholly unaware of the power God puts into her hand; this spiritual carte blanche on the infinite resources of God’s wisdom and power is rarely, if ever, used – never used to the full measure of honouring God.”

— E.M. Bounds

13. “It is the effectual, fervent prayer that influences God.”

— E.M. Bounds

14. “Luther said: “If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

15. “Whitfield once thus prayed, “O Lord, give me souls or take my soul.” After much closet pleading, “he once went to the Devil’s fair and took more than a thousand souls out of the paw of the lion in a single day.”

— E.M. Bounds

16. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed,” said the godly Dr. A. J. Gordon, “but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”

— E.M. Bounds

17. “God must help man by prayer. He who does not pray, therefore, robs himself of God’s help and places God where He cannot help man.”

— E.M. Bounds

18. “The Word of God is the fulcrum upon which the lever of prayer is placed, and by which things are mightily moved.”

— E.M. Bounds

19. “When we calmly reflect upon the fact that the progress of our Lord’s Kingdom is dependent upon prayer, it is sad to think that we give so little time to the holy exercise. Everything depends upon prayer, and yet we neglect it not only to our own spiritual hurt but also to the delay and injury of our Lord’s cause upon the earth.”

— E.M. Bounds

20. “God’s conquering days are when the saints have given themselves to mightiest prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

21. “Nothing is well done without prayer for the simple reason that it leaves God out of the account.”

— E.M. Bounds

22. “Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life.”

— E.M. Bounds

23. “Faith is the first, the foundation stone. Faith builds on Jesus Christ. Here faith is the foundation on which the whole spiritual building is reared. A foundation will do no good and will be ruined if no house is built on it The snow, the rain, the dew, the frost, the air, the sunshine, the breeze, will dissolve a foundation of adamant if no house be built on it On faith’s foundation, by all diligence, the spiritual superstructure must be reared.”

— E.M. Bounds

24. “If prayer puts God to work on earth, then, by the same token, prayerlessness rules God out of the world’s affairs, and prevents Him from working. And if prayer moves God to work in this world’s affairs, then prayerlessness excludes God from everything concerning men, and leaves man on earth the mere creature of circumstances, at the mercy of blind fate or without help of any kind from God.”

— E.M. Bounds

25. “The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words.”

— E.M. Bounds

26. “Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer. – John Wesley.”

— E.M. Bounds

27. “One of Satan’s wiliest tricks is to destroy the best by the good.”

— E.M. Bounds

28. “Prayer must be aflame. Its ardour must consume. Prayer without fervour is as a sun without light or heat, or as a flower without beauty or fragrance. A soul devoted to God is a fervent soul, and prayer is the creature of that flame. He only can truly pray who is all aglow for holiness, for God, and for heaven.”

— E.M. Bounds

29. “Those who know God the best are the richest and most powerful in prayer. Little acquaintance with God, and strangeness and coldness to Him, make prayer a rare and feeble thing. There.”

— E.M. Bounds

30. “Prayer is the channel through which all good flows from God to man, and all good from men to men.”

— E.M. Bounds

31. “A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.”

— E.M. Bounds

32. “The value of prayer does not lie in the number of prayers, or the length of prayers, but its value is found in the great truth that we are privileged by our relations to God to unburden our desires and make our requests known to God, and He will relieve by granting our petitions.”

— E.M. Bounds

33. “ABOVE ALL things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God’s Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.”

— E.M. Bounds

34. “Blessed is that home which has in it an altar of sacrifice and of prayer, where daily thanksgivings ascend to heaven and where morning and night praying is done.”

— E.M. Bounds

35. “Prayer puts God’s work in His hands, and keeps it there. It looks to Him constantly and depends on Him implicitly to further His own cause. Prayer is but faith resting in, acting with, and leaning on and obeying God. This is why God loves it so well, why He puts all power into its hands, and why He so highly esteems men of prayer.”

— E.M. Bounds

36. “We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be prepared – the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.”

— E.M. Bounds

37. “Your efforts have been unsuccessful, because you have sought without what you can only find within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will not fail to find Him.”

— E.M. Bounds

38. “To have God thus near is to enter the holy of holies – to breathe the fragrance of the heavenly air, to walk in Eden’s delightful gardens. Nothing but prayer can bring God and man into this happy communion.”

— E.M. Bounds

39. “Prayer was the secret of His power, the law of His life, the inspiration of His toil and the source of His wealth, His joy, His communion and His strength.”

— E.M. Bounds

40. “Mr. Wesley spent two hours daily in prayer. He began at four in the morning. Of him, one who knew him well wrote: “He thought prayer to be more his business than anything else, and I have seen him come out of his closet with a serenity of face next to shining.”

— E.M. Bounds

41. “We must remember that the goal of prayer is the ear of God. Unless that is gained the prayer has utterly failed.”

— E.M. Bounds

42. “Pray for “all men.” We usually pray more for things than we do for men. Our prayers should be thrown across their pathway as they rush in their downward course to a lost eternity.”

— E.M. Bounds

43. “Faith must be definite, specific; an unqualified, unmistakable request for the things asked for. It is not to be a vague, indefinite, shadowy thing; it must be something more than an abstract belief in God’s willingness and ability to do for us. It is to be a definite, specific, asking for, and expecting the things for which we ask.”

— E.M. Bounds

44. “Prayer is faith passing into act. A union of the will and intellect realising in an intellectual act.”

— E.M. Bounds

45. “Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.”

— E.M. Bounds

46. “The dispensation of the Holy Spirit is a dispensation of prayer, in a preeminent sense.”

— E.M. Bounds

47. “When we calmly reflect upon the fact that the progress of our Lord’s Kingdom is dependent upon prayer, it is sad to think that we give so little time to the holy exercise.”

— E.M. Bounds

48. “I do not mean that every prayer we offer is answered exactly as we desire it to be. Were this the case, it would mean that we would be dictating to God, and prayer would degenerate into a mere system of begging.”

— E.M. Bounds

49. “Leaders in the realm of religious activity are to be judged by their praying habits, and not by their money or social position.”

— E.M. Bounds

50. “Thanksgiving is oral, positive, active. It is the giving out of something to God. Thanksgiving comes out into the open. Gratitude is secret, silent, negative, passive, not showing its being till expressed in praise and thanksgiving. Gratitude is felt in the heart. Thanksgiving is the expression of that inward feeling.”

— E.M. Bounds