Meditations of the Heart
Howard Thurman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“Keep alive the dream; for as long as a man has a dream in his heart, he cannot lose the significance of living.”
“In the face of all the uncertainties that surround any decision, the wise man acts in the light of his best judgment illumined by the integrity of his profoundest spiritual insights. Then the rest is in the hands of the future and in the mind of God. The possibility of error, of profound and terrible error, is at once the height and the depth of man’s freedom. For this, God be praised!”
“. . . consider the conflict between loyalty to an ultimate goal and loyalty to an immediate goal, both of which are good but one seems to be better than the other, though more remote. The platitude, A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, is one answer. How often do we seize upon the immediate good because it is within reach and thereby sacrifice the better thing because the time interval is so great that we fear we shall die before we realize it! To escape the risk of losing all, we accept what is available.”
“Work and rest are one entity.”
“We are all of us indebted to a vast host of anonymous persons without whom some necessity would not have been available, some good which came to us, we would have missed. It is not too farfetched to say that living is itself an act of interdependence. . .However self-sufficient we are, our strength is always being supplied by others unknown to us whose paths led them down our street or by our house at the moment that we needed the light they could give. . . It is the way of life; it is one of the means by which God activates Himself in the texture of human life and human experience.”
“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 desire to be one's true self is ever persistent.”
“Life is Alive The awareness that the universe is dynamic gives to the individual the quiet assurance that wherever he may be located he is in immediate candidacy for the strength that comes from a boundless vitality. This fact makes for a universal kinship among all living things. The blessing of self-consciousness makes possible a deliberate relatedness out of which arise all of the joyous overtones of human relations. To understand another human being even dimly is to bring to a point of focus an Infinite Resource. The Psalmist states it is by insisting that 'the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
spiritual-wisdom, bibliotherapy, choices, spiritual-counseling, insight, spiritual-insight, freedom, transpersonal-psychology, spirituality, free-will, decision-making, theology, choices-and-consequences
