Parker Palmer Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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.

Parker Palmer
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 Palmer
A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts about a subject without being overly influenced by what others have thought before me.

Parker Palmer
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 Palmer
There is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as in way that opens up ahead of us. The opening may reveal our potentials while the closing may reveal our limits—two sides to the same coin, the coin called identity.

Parker Palmer
The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.

Parker Palmer
Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

Parker Palmer
Reality—including one's own—is divine, not to be defied but honored.

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

Parker Palmer
In classical understanding, education is the attempt to "lead out" from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name.

Parker Palmer
Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already posses.

Parker Palmer
When I understand this liability as a trade-off for my strengths, something new and liberating arises within me. I no longer want to have my liability fixed —by learning how to dance solo, for example, when no one wants to dance with me—for to do that would be to compromise or even destroy my gift.

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

Parker Palmer
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.

Parker Palmer
Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.

Parker Palmer
The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out - a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

Parker Palmer
Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.

Parker Palmer
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. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures … our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

Parker Palmer
I waste energy on anger rather than investing it in hope.

Parker Palmer
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 Palmer
If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract the price from others.

Parker Palmer
The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be selfish unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be.

Parker Palmer
The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

Parker Palmer
If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. Faking it in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail.

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

Parker Palmer
Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.

Parker Palmer