Top 100 Parker J. Palmer Quotes
#1. The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer
#2. A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.
Parker J. Palmer
#3. Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
Parker J. Palmer
#4. We are first among the nations in per capita giving: it would take three Frenchmen, seven Germans, or fourteen Italians to equal the charitable donations of one American.
Parker J. Palmer
#5. We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are.
Parker J. Palmer
#6. Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
Parker J. Palmer
#7. It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.
Parker J. Palmer
#9. Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings.
Parker J. Palmer
#10. The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.
Parker J. Palmer
#11. Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality ... an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.
Parker J. Palmer
#12. The more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.
Parker J. Palmer
#13. It's more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right.
Parker J. Palmer
#14. Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life
Parker J. Palmer
#15. the reality we belong to, the reality we long to know, extends far beyond human beings interacting with one another.
Parker J. Palmer
#16. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots.
Parker J. Palmer
#17. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
Parker J. Palmer
#18. Bill Moyers has said, "The antidote, the only antidote, to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people."10
Parker J. Palmer
#19. We must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness.
Parker J. Palmer
#21. The stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility
Parker J. Palmer
#22. A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.
Parker J. Palmer
#23. A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open-divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within-things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.
Parker J. Palmer
#24. By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another's solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.
Parker J. Palmer
#25. No punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.
Parker J. Palmer
#26. We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.
Parker J. Palmer
#27. Citizenship is a way of being in the world rooted in the knowledge that I am a member of a vast community of human and nonhuman beings that I depend on for essentials I could never provide for myself.
Parker J. Palmer
#28. Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.
Parker J. Palmer
#29. Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
#30. If one grows up in a family where trust does not exist and support cannot be found, one becomes an adult fearful of further rejection, an adult who will not risk community again.
Parker J. Palmer
#32. There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die.
Parker J. Palmer
#33. You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you ... Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?
Parker J. Palmer
#34. We are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. But choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid.
Parker J. Palmer
#35. By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.
Parker J. Palmer
#36. It seems ironic to suggest that some of us may be called to build community in our churches, for the church as it was meant to be is a historical archetype of community.
Parker J. Palmer
#37. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
Parker J. Palmer
#38. Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.
Parker J. Palmer
#39. Rightly understood, a myth is an effort to tell truths that cannot be told with mere facts or known by the senses and the mind alone, truths that take form only in that integrative place called the heart.
Parker J. Palmer
#40. Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self.
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
Parker J. Palmer
#41. By attaching our identity to things only a few can have, we ignore the intrinsic preciousness of all human life.
Parker J. Palmer
#42. I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.
Parker J. Palmer
#43. I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.
Parker J. Palmer
#44. Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
Parker J. Palmer
#45. Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
Parker J. Palmer
#46. The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28
Parker J. Palmer
#47. When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'
Parker J. Palmer
#48. First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader. Second, we all need other
people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice
Parker J. Palmer
#49. We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.
Parker J. Palmer
#50. truth cannot "be reduced to aphorism or formulas. It is something alive and unpronounceable. Story creates an atmosphere in which [truth] becomes discernible as a pattern."3
Parker J. Palmer
#51. Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?
Parker J. Palmer
#52. If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self.
Parker J. Palmer
#53. Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
Parker J. Palmer
#54. Self-care is never a selfish act - it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.
Parker J. Palmer
#55. Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand - the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.
Parker J. Palmer
#56. I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.
Parker J. Palmer
#58. We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.
Parker J. Palmer
#59. Another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations-projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves-and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.
Parker J. Palmer
#60. Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
Parker J. Palmer
#61. Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
#62. The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart.
Parker J. Palmer
#63. 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?
Parker J. Palmer
#64. The past isn't fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.
Parker J. Palmer
#65. We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids.
Parker J. Palmer
#67. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.
Parker J. Palmer
#68. We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves.
Parker J. Palmer
#69. Today education has become a training ground for competition.
Parker J. Palmer
#70. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
Parker J. Palmer
#71. Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
Parker J. Palmer
#72. Our problem as Americans
at least, among my race and gender
is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.
Parker J. Palmer
#73. What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?
Parker J. Palmer
#74. We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.
Parker J. Palmer
#75. 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.
Parker J. Palmer
#76. The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.
Parker J. Palmer
#77. Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.
Parker J. Palmer
#78. 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.
Parker J. Palmer
#79. The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.
Parker J. Palmer
#80. How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.
Parker J. Palmer
#81. Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.
Parker J. Palmer
#83. If we want to grow as teachers
we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives
risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
Parker J. Palmer
#84. The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Parker J. Palmer
#85. We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer.
Parker J. Palmer
#86. For the good [person] to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and
narrow path compared to which his [or her] previous rectitude was flowery license.
Parker J. Palmer
#87. Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks
we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.
Parker J. Palmer
#88. There is no guarantee that starting a small conversation will lead to something larger. But the failure to take any step at all, no matter how small, comes with an ironclad guarantee that we will not be part of helping change happen.
Parker J. Palmer
#89. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
Parker J. Palmer
#90. Humility is the only lens though which great things can be seen
and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.
Parker J. Palmer
#91. The kind of teaching that transforms people does not happen if the student's inward teacher is ignored ... we can speak to the teacher within our students only when we are on speaking terms with the teacher within ourselves.
Parker J. Palmer
#92. The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of "self-impersonation," and betray our identities.2
Parker J. Palmer
#93. The civility we need will not come from watching our tongues. It will come from valuing our differences.
Parker J. Palmer
#94. Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.
Parker J. Palmer
#95. From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.
Parker J. Palmer
#96. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
#97. We cannot see what is "out there" merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.
Parker J. Palmer
#98. One dwells with God by being faithful to one's nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one's own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.
Parker J. Palmer
#99. A politician who brings personal integrity into leadership helps us reclaim the popular trust that distinguishes true democracy from its cheap imitations.
Parker J. Palmer
#100. I assume that each person contains all the potentials that education wishes to cultivate: insight, capacity for observation and analysis, ability to appreciate, creative energy.
Parker J. Palmer
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
