Top 46 Howard Thurman Quotes
#1. 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
#2. What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery.
Howard Thurman
#3. In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense [ ... ] They are thrown back upon themselves for their rating.
Howard Thurman
#4. 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
#5. He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.
Howard Thurman
#6. Keep alive the dream; for as long as a man has a dream in his heart, he cannot lose the significance of living.
Howard Thurman
#7. 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
#8. Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you.
Howard Thurman
#9. Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.
Howard Thurman
#10. He recognized with authentic realism that 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope.
Howard Thurman
#15. There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.
Howard Thurman
#16. What the world need is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers.
Howard Thurman
#20. 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
#21. A bigot is a person who makes an idol of his commitments.
Howard Thurman
#22. Christmas is waiting to be born: in you, in me, in all mankind.
Howard Thurman
#23. There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another's need out of one's fullness and plenty. One
Howard Thurman
#24. At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live.
Howard Thurman
#26. Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale ... Love loves; this is its nature.
Howard Thurman
#27. And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.
Howard Thurman
#28. There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will 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
#29. Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. It has long been a matter of serious moment that for decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings.
Howard Thurman
#36. There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'
Howard Thurman
#37. The Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine when he went about his Father's business, announcing the acceptable year of the Lord.
Howard Thurman
#38. To love is to make of one's heart a swinging door.
Howard Thurman
#39. There must be always remaining in every life, some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathless and beautiful.
Howard Thurman
#40. 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
#42. During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.
Howard Thurman
#43. Christmas is a mood, a quality, a symbol. It is never merely a fact.
Howard Thurman
#44. Twilight - a time of pause when nature changes her guard. All living things would fade and die from too much light or too much dark, if twilight were not.
Howard Thurman
#46. 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
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