149 Quotes by 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.

Is the life I’m living the life that wants to live in me?

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.

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

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.

As a white, male American who has always been well-off – the kind of person for whom this nation has always worked best – the gift of full citizenship, unquestioned and unchallenged, came to me as an accident of birth. Today I realize the magnitude of that gift. But for years I was an unconscious and ungrateful recipient because attaining citizenship required no effort from me.

I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.

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

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.