149 Quotes by Parker J. Palmer

Here, I think, is 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.

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.

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.

Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now – in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world’s toxicity and begins to die.

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.

A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.

One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one’s own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.

Humility is the only lens though which great things can be seen – and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.