Top 50 Howard Thurman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Positive Life Quotes, Empowering Quotes, Short Inspirational Quotes, Feel Good Quotes, Life Lessons Quotes

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Ask yourself what makes you come alive.”

— Howard Thurman

5. “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

6. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

7. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

9. “Growth always involves the risk of failure.”

— Howard Thurman

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

— Howard Thurman

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

— Howard Thurman

12. “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

13. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

14. “To love is to make of one’s heart a swinging door.”

— Howard Thurman

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Follow the grain in your own wood...”

— Howard Thurman

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

24. “He who fears is literally delivered to destruction.”

— Howard Thurman

25. “Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.”

— Howard Thurman

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

29. “It is only when people live in an environment in which they are not required to exert supreme effort into just keeping alive that they seem to be able to select ends besides those of mere physical survival.”

— Howard Thurman

30. “Perfect love is long delayed.”

— Howard Thurman

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Howard Thurman

33. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

35. “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them? The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others whose need may be greater, but what religion offers to meet their own needs. The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life.”

— Howard Thurman

36. “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

37. “There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another’s need out of one’s fullness and plenty. One.”

— Howard Thurman

38. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

39. “Life wears down the edges of the mind.”

— Howard Thurman

40. “Of all weapons, love is the most deadly and devastating, and few there be who dare trust their fate in its hands.”

— Howard Thurman

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Howard Thurman

44. “What the world need is people who have come alive.”

— Howard Thurman

45. “A man is a man, no more, no less. The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity.”

— Howard Thurman

46. “Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak.”

— Howard Thurman

47. “If a man is convinced that he is safe only as long as he uses his power to give others a sense of insecurity, then the measure of their security is in his hands. If security or insecurity is at the mercy of a single individual or group, then control of behavior becomes routine. All imperialism functions in this way.”

— Howard Thurman

48. “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

49. “They who seek God with all their hearts must, however, some day on their way meet Jesus.1.”

— Howard Thurman

50. “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”

— Howard Thurman