Quaker Leadership Quotes

Quotes & queries to inspire leadership among Quakers and friends of Friends

Curated by the Quaker Leadership Center at Earlham School of Religion

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift... That kind of giving is not  only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me.

-Parker Palmer

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

A Quaker leader: thinks globally, shares ideas proactively, takes risks, maintains and nurtures a spiritual awareness, honors the role of the community and derives personal satisfaction from the success of the community.

-Arthur Larrabee

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

I have long believed that speaking truth is both the simplest way of leading your life and one of the most difficult to achieve.

-Judith Aitchison

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Peace in ourselves, peace in the world.

-Thich Nhat Hahn

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.

-Elizabeth Fry

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Perhaps community is a constellation. Each one of us is a light in the emerging collective brightness. A constellation of light has the greater power of illumination than any single light would have on its own.
Together we increase brightness.

-John O’Donohue

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but for that reason it should be most our care to learn it.

– William Penn

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.

-James Baldwin

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Let us not tire of preaching love. It is the force that will overcome the world.

-Oscar Romero

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought...

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears...

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.

-Octavia Butler

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

There are two kinds of silence: one is bitter silence; the other is sweet silence. Bitter silence is the quiet that freezes people out. Sweet silence is the quiet that takes us inside ourselves so that we can come out later softer and humbler than before.

-Joan Chittister

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

This will not be accomplished unless the fire gets much hotter than it is now.

-Elton Trueblood

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

There is no hope for a brilliant future in the Quaker story without a conscious, deliberate, and sustained effort to enlist and to train and ministry related to the peculiar needs of our time and therefore different from any of the stereotypes with which we have been familiar.

[Thee Quaker Podcast @QuakerPodcast]

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[Thee Quaker Podcast @QuakerPodcast]

Are you feeling nervous about the upcoming US general election? Wondering what Quakers can do to prevent election violence and stand up for democracy in these tense times?

Join us for a live discussion with Diane Randall, former General Secretary for Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Emily Provance, Quaker minister and leader of election violence prevention programs, for ideas and encouragement. Thee Quaker Podcast host Georgia Sparling will moderate.

Tues, Oct 1, 7 pm EST.

Register for free! https://t.co/lTTUmmAAD1

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

-Thomas Merton

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

I shall not waste any effort in trying to reduce God to my particular logic. Here in the quietness, I shall give myself in love to God.

-Howard Thurman

[Quaker Leadership Quotes @QuakerLeads]

The trouble with nearly everybody who prays is that [they] say "Amen" and run away before God has a chance to reply. Listening to God is far more important than giving [God] our ideas.

- Frank Laubach