Love Quote by John Bunyan

A Puritan punchline disguised as pastoral advice: Bunyan is warning that the most dangerous thing you can bring into prayer is fluency. The line sets up a clean moral inversion - the “better” prayer is the one that looks, on paper, like it has less: no eloquent phrasing, no polished petitions, maybe not even coherent sentences. What matters is the interior pressure behind it, the heart’s seriousness, not the mouth’s performance.

That contrast isn’t just devotional; it’s cultural. Bunyan wrote in a world where religious language could be a social credential and where public piety often blurred into public theater. As a Nonconformist preacher who suffered imprisonment, he had every reason to distrust religion as institution and as ornament. The subtext: prayer can become another kind of status display, a way to sound righteous without the inconvenience of being changed. “Words without a heart” reads like a quiet accusation aimed at showy worship, official liturgy, and anyone who has learned the dialect of holiness without the substance.

The phrasing does extra work. “Heart” isn’t a Hallmark metaphor here; for Bunyan it signals sincerity, conviction, repentance - the raw material of salvation. By preferring a “heart without words,” he makes room for the inarticulate, the ashamed, the poor, the spiritually exhausted. It’s also a discipline for the articulate: if your prayer sounds impressive, check whether it costs you anything. In Bunyan’s economy, God is not persuaded by rhetoric; God is addressed by truth.