Quotes from Howard Thurman

This book provides a message to Black children on how to thrive and flourish in a world that attempts to destroy their humanity from the "inside" out.

FEAR is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited.

There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the 'angel with the flaming sword.' Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes 'the angel with the flaming sword' to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of 'the fluid area of your consent.' This is your crucial link with the Eternal.

The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not. In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.

It is a subject that is taboo unless there is some extraordinary social crisis—such as war—involving the mobilization of all the national resources of the common life to meet it. There is a conspiracy of silence about hatred, its function and its meaning.

The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.

Most of the accepted social behavior-patterns assume segregation to be normal—if normal, then correct, if correct, then moral; if moral, then religious. Religion is thus made a defender and guarantor of the presumptions.

To revile because one has been reviled—this is the real evil because it is the evil of the soul itself.

They loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more. They made their public peace with Rome and went on about the business of living.

How foolish it is, how terrible, if you have not found your Island of Peace within your own soul. It means you are living without the discovery of your true home.

It is good to make an end of movement, to come to a point of rest, a place of pause. There is some strange magic in activity, in keeping at it, in continuing to be involved in many things that excite the mind and keep the hours swiftly passing. But it is a deadly magic; one is not wise to trust it with too much confidence. The moment of pause, the point of rest, has its own magic.

Work and rest are one entity.

It is very easy to sit in judgment upon the behavior of others but often difficult to realize that every judgment is a self-judgment.

Sometimes there is only a sixty-second divide between youth and maturity, childhood and adulthood, strength and weakness, life and death. That life is vulnerable is the key to its longevity.

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?

I will make of my life a High Priest of Truth.

When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create.

The desire to be one's true self is ever persistent.

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

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

Growth always involves the risk of failure.

Dont 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.

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.

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