149 Quotes by 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.

Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the 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.

Good teaching comes from good people.

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

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

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.

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.

Vocation at its deepest level is, “This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.

Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. “Why do people want to adopt another culture?” she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. “Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.”5.