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“I used to be a poet.
My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.
Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.

Now I am old...
drunk on wine and candle fumes.
Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air
so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.
I used to be a poet
and my words were gold.”
― Roman Payne

“As a kid, I was taught that if you opened the Bible in the middle you'd probably land on the book of Psalms. And near the middle is everyone's favorite, the 23rd, there is this line: "You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies." I don't know how many times I've read or recited this Psalm without pondering what that line actually means, but here is my take on it. When things are a bit tense, when life is not going at its best, when the potential for disaster is just around the corner, when your enemies are all around you - and even staring you down! - that's when God lays out the red-checkered picnic cloth and says, "Oooo, this is a nice place. Let's hang out here together for a while...just you and me.”
― David Brazzeal, Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul

“But this is one of the rewards of reading the Old Testament regularly. You keep on discovering more and more what a tissue of quotations from it the New Testament is; how constantly our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom He introduced a novelty...The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, "original".”
― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

“John Calvin called the Book of Psalms ‘an anatomy of all parts of the soul.â€� All the range of emotions are expressed; the Psalms weave an emotional fabric for the human soul. These inspired lyrics take us by the hand and train us in proper emotion. They lead us to emotional maturity.”
― Kevin Swanson, The Tattooed Jesus: What Would the Real Jesus Do with Pop Culture?

“5. The reading of the Scriptures with godly fear, the sound preaching, and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith, and reverence; singing of psalms with grace in heart; as also the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God: besides religious oaths, vows solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in a holy and religious manner.

Another element of true worship is the "signing of psalms with grace in the heart." It will be observed that the Confession does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the use of modern hymns in the worship of God, but rather only the psalms of the Old Testament. It is not generally realized today that Presbyterian (and many other Reformed) churches originally used only the inspired psalms, hymns and songs of the biblical Psalter in divine worship, but such is the case. The Westminster Assembly not only expressed the conviction that the psalms should be sung in divine worship, but implemented it by preparing a metrical version of the Psalter for use in the churches. This is not the place to attempt a consideration of this question. But we must record our conviction that the Confession is correct at this point. It is correct, we believe, because it has never been proved that God has commanded his Church to sing the uninspired compositions of men rather than or along with the inspired songs, hymns, and psalms of the Psalter in divine worship.”
― G.I. Williamson

“There are many themes found in the Book of Psalms that are generally not found in modern music. These include the fear of God, the righteousness and justice of God, the sovereignty of God, the judgement of God, the evil of sin, spiritual and physical warfare, the arch enemies of the Christian, the destruction of the wicked, the reality of hell, the blessedness of the church, the vicious attacks upon the church, the commandments of God, the dominion of David’s son, and so on. Without the backdrop of these truths, the themes of love, mercy, faith, and salvation become largely meaningless.”
― Kevin Swanson

“The Psalms draw a hard and fast distinction between the righteous and the wicked, something that is not appreciated in a period of religious syncretism.”
― Kevin Swanson

“The loss of psalmody in the church is one of the early indicators of the loss of faith.”
― Kevin Swanson

“When it comes to salvation, we are all fugitives. Psalm 119:176”
― Felix Wantang, God's Blueprint of the Holy Bible

“To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet--is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Everyone lies to their neighbor; they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts. (Psalms 12:1-2 NIV)”
― Anonymous

“The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he may stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version

“The Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation.”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: English Standard Version

“The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.”
― Psalm 9:10

“Be still and know that I am God”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version

“My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?' (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, 'In death there is no one that is mindful of thee.' So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, 'When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I'll take care of you,' and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“There's a reason Psalm 51 is the best known of the Penitential Psalms and one of the best-loved psalms of all. It speaks to the deep pain we feel inside us when we sin, and then it shows us the mercy of God. His is the love of a Father who sees his child's stricken face â€� washes the tears away â€� and then reaches inside to create in us "a clean heart;" to breathe "a new and right spirit" within us.”
― Sarah Christmyer, Create in Me a Clean Heart: Ten Minutes a Day in the Penitential Psalms

“Among the papyri interpreted as fragments of books once used by teachers and students, the Psalter is better represented than any other volume of Jewish or Christian canonical Scripture, strongly suggesting that the Davidic Psalter was more used and read ‘than any book of the Old Testament, perhaps more than any book of the Bible, throughout the Christian centuries in Egyptâ€�. A recent inventory of papyrus notebooks lists eleven items for the period between the third century and the seventh inclusive, of which eight give primarily or exclusively the texts of the psalms. Narrowing the period of the third century to the fifth gives seven papyrus items of which five contain copies of psalms. These notebooks are the best guide to what the literate slaves of larger households, grammar masters and attentive parents were teaching their infants in Egypt, both Jewish and Christian, and they suggest that the psalms were a fundamental teaching text in the social circles where men and women used writing, or aspired to it for their children. That is hardly surprising, since the psalms were ideal for teaching the young in households wealthy enough to afford the luxury of an education for an offspring. An almanac of prayer and counsel for times of good and adverse fortune, the poems of the Psalter are arranged in sense-units of moderate length by virtue of the poetic form. This makes them amenable to study, including the slow process of acquiring the skills of penmanship (Pl. 29).”
― Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years

“I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.”
― Erri De Luca, Tre cavalli

“Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.”
― Psalm 20:8

“When we are in the darkness, we begin to feel like we have always been there. But it is not true. David reminds himself that God has been faithful in the past; God will be faithful again. He urges himself to put his hope in God because the morning will come.”
― John Eldredge, Moving Mountains: Praying with Passion, Confidence, and Authority

“The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness.”
― Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

“As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness;
I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.
-Psalm 17:15”
― God, New King James Version

“It is for my good that I was afflicted, so that I might learn Your statutes. [...] Had Your Torah not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.”
― Anonymous, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures

“Remove Your affliction from me; I am devastated by the attack of Your hand. In reproach for sin You chastened man; like a moth, You wore away that which is precious to him. All mankind is nothing but futility, forever. Hear my prayer, O Lord, listen to my cry; do not be silent to my tears, for I am a stranger with You, a sojourner like all my forefathers. Turn from me, that I may recover my strength, before I depart and I am no more.”
― Anonymous, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures

“The Torah of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making wise the simpleton.”
― Anonymous, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures

“She told me she'd chosen something for the headstone, part of a verse from Psalm eighty-four- 'Yea, the sparrow hath found an house.' I never got to see it; the headstone was being engraved."
"'And the swallow a nest for herself.' That was one of my mother's favorite psalms," he said.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“There’s something about lifting your voice to God, especially in the words of the Psalms. If you have something to be thankful for, it gives shape to your gratefulness. And if you don’t, the song becomes a place into which to pour your overflowing heart. The psalms give voice to your sorrow and pain, and singing them lifts up your heart. It resets your focus on God and gives you hope.”
― Sarah Christmyer, Becoming Women of the Word: How to Answer God's Call with Purpose and Joy

“The Psalms are a school of prayer in which we can learn to gather our troubles, fears, inadequacies, and needs and take them to the One who loves us. With confidence, we can cry with the psalmist, "O Lord, make haste to help me!”
― Sarah Christmyer, Lord, Make Haste to Help Me!: Seven Psalms to Pray in Times of Need