Top Parker J. Palmer Quotes

Parker J. Palmer Biography

Parker J. Palmer is an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He is the founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal.

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Parker J. Palmer Quotes

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.

Self, Opposites, Dancing, Profoundly, Truths

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…. . Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

Heart, Identity, Real, Understand, Who I Am, Willfulness

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.

Leader, Leadership, Person, Responsibility, Special, Take

You are much more likely to have a holy experience in a quiet, focused, and communal context than you are when you are being entertained.

Context, Focused, Holy, Quiet

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

Meeting, Student, Students, Teacher, Teaching

I don't do a lot of top-down teaching.

Teaching, Top Down

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.

Teacher, Safety, Culture, Profession, Seeks, Talk

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.

Deficient, Failures, Force Fields, Requires, Self, Unconditional Love

Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need

Direct, Honestly, Journey, Journeys, Needs, World

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.

Act, Fears, Needs, Places, Speak

My high school, like most high schools, had a pretty rigid stratification system. Kids were clustered into groups - the studious ones, the athletes, the popular ones - and we never crossed paths with each other. You stayed in your air-tight group, and you were suspicious of people in other groups.

Athlete, Crossed, Kids, Like, School

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

Birthright, Heart, Let, Meaning, Rob

Every young person needs some adult who's just wild and crazy about them!

Adult, Adults, Crazy, Needs, Person

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Intend, Intends, Life, Listen, Tell

Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self. It is not about the absence of other people -- it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people -- it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.

Awareness, Fully, Mean, People, Reality, Self

Opposing what's wrong is a halfway measure at best. A rebel must also have a vision for something better, a strategy for moving toward that vision and a capacity to rally and join with others in achieving it. If the anger that drives rebellion is not transformed into the hope that inspires movement communities, it will do more harm than good.

Moving, Community, Inspire, Strategy, Movement

Hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when the 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.

Benefits, Guests, Nomadic, Offering, Stranger, Yesterday

If my life is any example, the work that youth workers are doing is very, very important. It tends to get marginalized in the church or seen as less important than being a senior minister in a large, prosperous congregation; but I don't believe that for a minute. I think this is absolutely critical work in the life of the church; and I think my path in life would have been much different if it hadn't been for my youth minister, Burt Randle, and a series of campus ministers in both college and graduate school.

Believe, Congregation, Large, Minute, School, Senior

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

Transform, Transformed, World

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

Opportunity, Possibility, Reality, View, Views

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Parker J. Palmer Biography

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