Quotes from Parker Palmer

I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.

As a young man, I yearned for the day when, rooted in the experience that comes only with age, I could do my work fearlessly. But today, in my mid-sixties, I realize that I will feel fear from time to time for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of my fear. But . . . I can learn to walk into it and through it whenever it rises up . . . naming the inner force that triggers . . . fear . . . Naming our fears aloud . . . is the first step toward transcending them.

You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you…Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does -- maybe more.

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

Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.

When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off.

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.

Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole...The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simple by either-or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think together we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves.

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self.

We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.

Way has never opened in front of me…but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that has had the same guiding effect.

There is no guarantee that starting a small conversation will lead to something larger. But the failure to take any step at all, no matter how small, comes with an ironclad guarantee that we will not be part of helping change happen.

From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.

I now genuinely believe that self-knowledge and self-reflection is invaluable to doing good work in this world.

They should be encouraged to bring all of who they are and what they know into each class. By welcoming the whole student into our classes, unfamiliar aspects of who they are and what they care about suddenly come into view. What are the heartfelt questions they struggle with? Are they too scared to acknowledge the hopes and aspirations they harbor for their lives and for this world?

Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience.

Educate our students as whole people, and they will bring all of who they are to the demands of being human in private and public life. The present and future well being of humankind asks nothing less of us.