Quotes from Parker J. Palmer

The teachers who have had the most impact on me and on most learners I know are teachers whose "selfhoods" have been deeply invested in what they are doing.

I have to say that I have been blessed with significant teachers at every stage of my life.

The past isn't fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.

We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.

My favorite topping is one that a lot of people don't like. I love anchovies.

In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

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.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.

By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.

If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

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

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

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

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

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.

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.