Quotes from Parker J. Palmer

Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

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

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

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a "Be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God" mindset.

God ain't finished with any of us yet.

Good teaching comes from good people.

You don't become a good teacher by applying techniques; you don't become a good teacher by using the latest hot methodologies that are being promoted in this or that handbook.

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

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.

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

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

A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

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

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids.

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

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.