Parker J. Palmer Quotes & Sayings

Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when this reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend - thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. It is that way in teaching as well: the teacher's hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: "Be not afraid." Though the traditions vary widely in the ways they propose to take us beyond fear, all hold out the same hope: we can escape fear's paralysis and enter a state of grace where encounters with otherness will not threaten us but will enrich our work and our lives. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

Finally (and here is a sentence I never imagined writing), I thank my conversation partners on Facebook. A couple of years ago, my friend Finn Ryan set up a Facebook author page for me. Grateful as I was, my skepticism about the medium kept me from posting anything there until six months before I finished this book. I am very glad that I took the leap. The folks who share that space with me have helped me refine a number of key ideas, allowing me to write a better book than I could have written alone. Many thanks to all my Facebook "friends" as well as my face-to-face friends. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

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

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 them than we are of breathing. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

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

Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life — Parker J. Palmer

Honest, open questions are countercultural, — Parker J. Palmer

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

becoming one's self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'=
If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts and as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few years ago, my daughter and her newborn baby came to live — Parker J. Palmer

does it mean to listen to a voice before it is — Parker J. Palmer

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 J. Palmer

Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me? — Parker J. 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 J. Palmer

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

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

Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life. — Parker J. Palmer

In a culture of technique, we often confuse authority with power, but the two are not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out ... I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my inner teacher and therefore with my own authority. In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades ... Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation. — Parker J. 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 J. 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 J. Palmer

It's more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right. — Parker J. Palmer

Embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding
because once you do that, you must live your whole life. One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, life became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others. — Parker J. Palmer

We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves. — Parker J. Palmer

I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation. They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live "divided no more," the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one's truth to be on the inside — Parker J. Palmer

Harrowing
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year's growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scared.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever's been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that's to come
I plowed to unearth last year's reasons
The farmer plows to plant a greening season. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am blessed to live in a democracy, not a totalitarian state. But the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by a brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb. — Parker J. Palmer

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

Under stress, an unexercised heart will explode in frustration or fury. If the situation is especially tense, that exploding heart may be hurled like a fragment grenade toward the source of its pain. But a heart that has been consistently exercised through conscious engagement with suffering is more likely to break open instead of apart. Such a heart has learned how to flex to hold tension in a way that expands its capacity for both suffering and joy. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Each time I walk into a classroom, I can choose the place within myself from which my teaching will come, just as I can choose the place within my students toward which my teaching will be aimed. I need not teach from a fearful place: I can teach from my curiosity or hope or empathy or honesty, places that are as real within me as are my fears. I can have fear, but I need not be fear - if I am willing to stand somewhere else in my inner landscape. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are. — Parker J. Palmer

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess-the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place. — Parker J. Palmer

Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world. Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility-and a source of profound hope for change. It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of its all. — Parker J. Palmer

Our equal and opposite needs for solitude and community constitute a great paradox. When it is torn apart, both of these life-giving states of being degenerate into deathly specters of themselves. Solitude split off from community is no longer a rich and fulfilling experience of inwardness; now it becomes loneliness, a terrible isolation. Community split off from solitude is no longer a nurturing network of relationships; now it becomes a crowd, an alienating buzz of too many people and too much noise. — Parker J. Palmer

The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them. — Parker J. Palmer

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. — Parker J. Palmer

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

The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference. — Parker J. Palmer

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it. — Parker J. Palmer

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

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

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

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

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer

When the heart is supple, it can be "broken open" into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them. — Parker J. Palmer

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions. — Parker J. Palmer

If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death. What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life. — Parker J. Palmer

There's a lot of fear connected with the inner journey because it penetrates our illusions. Taking the inner journey will lead you into some very shadowy places. You're going to learn things about yourself that you'll wish you didn't know. There are monsters in there-monsters you can't control-but trying to keep them hidden will only give them greater power. — Parker J. Palmer

We continually make decisions in private which affect the commonweal, as the ecologists (to take but one example) have shown us. When I keep my house warmer than it needs to be, I consume fuel which might help someone else keep warm, or keep a job. When the food I eat is high on the protein chain I contribute to a maldistribution of protein around the world. When I teach my children to be primarily concerned with private gain, I diminish the ranks of public leadership in the rising generation. — Parker J. Palmer

Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust - between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents - has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school's capacity to serve students well: "Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors." 9 — Parker J. 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 J. 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 J. Palmer

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

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

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

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. — Parker J. Palmer

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. — Parker J. Palmer

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

When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. — Parker J. Palmer

Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole ... The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simple by either-or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think together we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves. — Parker J. Palmer

One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. — Parker J. Palmer

..when we live behind a wall, our inner darkness cannot be penetrated by the light that is in the world. In fact, all we can see "out there" is darkness, not realizing how much of it is of our own making! As a young man, the wall allowed me to cast my own darkness on others while remaining blissfully ignorant of how they saw me. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. — Parker J. Palmer

We must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness. — Parker J. Palmer

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

The English word "truth" comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word "troth," as in the ancient vow "I pledge thee my troth." With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in mutually accountable and transforming relationship ... to know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one's whole self ... to know in truth is to be known as well. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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? — Parker J. Palmer

Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, I
was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be
anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message was
that both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy and
commitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was to
get with the program. My troubles began, of course, when I started to slam
into my limitations, especially in the form of failure. — Parker J. Palmer

There's often a distressing disconnect between the good words we speak and the way we live our lives. In personal relations and politics, the mass media, the academy and organized religion, our good words tend to float away even as they leave our lips, ascending to an altitude where they neither reflect nor connect with the human condition. We long for words like love, truth, and justice to become flesh and dwell among us. But in our violent world, it's risky business to wrap our frail flesh around words like those, and we don't like the odds. — Parker J. Palmer

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

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

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered - when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience) - the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is. — Parker J. 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 J. Palmer

The human soul doesn't want to be fixed, it simply wants to be seen and heard. The soul is like a wild animal - tough, resilient and shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself. — Parker J. Palmer