Parker J. Palmer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Parker J. Palmer

Parker J. Palmer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Parker J. Palmer on Wise Famous Quotes.

By attaching our identity to things only a few can have, we ignore the intrinsic preciousness of all human life.

Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings.

Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.

What seed was planted when you or I arrived on earth with our identities intact? How can we recall and reclaim those birthright gifts and potentials?

The civility we need will not come from watching our tongues. It will come from valuing our differences.

I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.

Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.

The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.

A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.

The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.

Don't let anyone or anything rob you of the beauty and meaning at the heart of life. It's your birthright gift.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

Long into my career I harbored a secret sense that thinking and reading and writing, as much as I loved them, did not qualify as real work.

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

Way has never opened in front of me ... but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that has had the same guiding effect.

I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does
maybe more.

Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life

does it mean to listen to a voice before it is

Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?

Honest, open questions are countercultural,

We must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness.

The stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility

well-structured group can be smarter than any of its members.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

Bill Moyers has said, "The antidote, the only antidote, to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people."10

Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.

the reality we belong to, the reality we long to know, extends far beyond human beings interacting with one another.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Today education has become a training ground for competition.

Humility is the only lens though which great things can be seen
and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.

I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.

Good teaching comes from good people.

It's more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right.

When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'

The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim.

The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.

In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.

We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves.

We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer.

The past isn't fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.

What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?

In the presence of a newly minted human being, I am reminded of what wholeness looks like. And I am sometimes moved to wonder, "Whatever became of me?

Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.

There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die.

The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.

The more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.

The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart.

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.

We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.