Top 48 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers.

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

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

He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Growth always involves the risk of failure.

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.

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

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.

Christmas is waiting to be born: in you, in me, in all mankind.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Life wears down the edges of the mind.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

Follow the grain in your own wood.

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

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

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.

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.

Perfect love is long delayed.

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.

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.

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.

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.

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

Ask yourself what makes you come alive.

What the world need is people who have come alive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.

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

keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.

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.