Howard Thurman famous quotes

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive
-- Howard Thurman

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature.
-- Howard Thurman

#Life #Merit #Awareness

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

#Courage #Spring #Rivers

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

#Inspiration #Waiting #Sound

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

#Heart #Men #Dedication

What the world need is people who have come alive.
-- Howard Thurman

#People #Needs #Alive

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

#Peace #War #Hatred

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

#Beautiful #Angel #Singing

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

#Stress #Hands #Joy

keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.
-- Howard Thurman

#Moments #Resolve

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

#Two #Firsts

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

#Determination #Hard Life #Life Is

A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope.
-- Howard Thurman

#Dream #Horizon #Possibility

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 brothers, To make music in the heart.
-- Howard Thurman

#Song #Brother #Kings

I will light candles this Christmas, Candles of joy, despite all sadness, Candles of hope where despair keeps watch. Candles of courage where fear is ever present, Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days, Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens. Candles of love to inspire all my living, Candles that will burn all the year long.
-- Howard Thurman

#Sadness #Light #Years

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

#Adventure #Bears #Stories

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

#Heart #Giving #Despair

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

#Dream #Heart #Wings

Follow the grain in your own wood....
-- Howard Thurman

#Woods #Grain

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

#Mean #Reality #Overcoming

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

#Men #Order #Use

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

#Men #Order #Epithet

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

#Memories #Dark #Years

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

#May #Limits #Silent

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

#Christmas #Quality #Facts

He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.
-- Howard Thurman

#Destruction

The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.
-- Howard Thurman

#Years #Decision #Challenges

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

#Jesus #Father #Hatred

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

#Jesus #Prayer #Communication

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

#Fate #Destiny #Men

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

#New Year #Gratitude #Hands

Ask yourself what makes you come alive.
-- Howard Thurman

#Alive

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

#Brother #Long #Community

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

#Christian #Strong #Powerful

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

#Mean #Commitment #Yield

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

#Twilight #Dark #Light

To love is to make of one's heart a swinging door.
-- Howard Thurman

#Love #Heart #Love Is

A bigot is a person who makes an idol of his commitments.
-- Howard Thurman

#Commitment #Idols #Discipline

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

#Heart #Men #Secret

Growth always involves the risk of failure.
-- Howard Thurman

#Risk #Growth

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

#Sea #Numbers #Long

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comesAnd the heart consumes itself as if it would live,Where children age before their timeAnd 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

#Children #Heart #Men