149 Quotes by 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.

It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relationships which I am capable of love and others in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need – all in the name of love.

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.

A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.

Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it’s needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again – if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words.

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.

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture – it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives – we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

It’s more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right.

I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts – faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could. For helping me understand this – and for imbuing.