Howard Thurman Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Howard Thurman
During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

Howard Thurman
Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.

Howard Thurman
At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live.

Howard Thurman
There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one's experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.

Howard Thurman
Liberty can be taken away. But freedom! Freedom is the process by which, standing in my place, where I am, I can so act in that place as to influence, order, alter, or change the future—that time is not frozen, that life is not so fixed that it cannot respond to my own will, my own inner processes.... Freedom is the sense of option, the sense of alternatives which only I can affect.

Howard Thurman
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself... the only true guide you'll ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

Howard Thurman
Men may build huge dams, there may be profound disturbances of the earth's surface that throw the river out of its course and force it to cut a new channel across a bed of granite, but at last the river will get to the sea.

Howard Thurman
It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied.

Howard Thurman
Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny.

Howard Thurman
The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in
the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.

Howard Thurman
A man must be at home somewhere before he can feel at home everywhere.

Howard Thurman
Fate is the raw materials of experience. They come uninvited and often unanticipated. Destiny is what a man does with these raw materials.

Howard Thurman
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.

Howard Thurman
Listen To The Long Stillness:
New life is stirring
New dreams are on the wing
New Hopes Are Being Readied:
Humankind is fashioning a new heart
Humankind is forging a new mind
God is at work.
This is the season of Promise

Howard Thurman
The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men and women often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires.

Howard Thurman
In whatever sense this year is a new year for you, may the moment find you eager and unafraid, ready to take it by the hand with joy and gratitude.

Howard Thurman
It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed-this, despite the gospel.

Howard Thurman
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Howard Thurman
Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you.

Howard Thurman
The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived.

Howard Thurman
Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.

Howard Thurman
Utopia is what the imagination of man has to say about the possibilities of the human spirit.

Howard Thurman
The measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.

Howard Thurman
If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.

Howard Thurman
Christmas is a mood, a quality, a symbol. It is never merely a fact.

Howard Thurman
Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.

Howard Thurman
Prayer is a form of communication between God and man and man and God…. I am always impressed by the fact that it is recorded that the only thing that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to do was to pray.

Howard Thurman
Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes
And the heart consumes itself as if it would live,
Where children age before their time
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day's life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:
In you, in me, in all mankind.

Howard Thurman
Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.

Howard Thurman