Quotes from Parker J. Palmer

Bill Moyers has said, "The antidote, the only antidote, to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people."10

A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.

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.

When the heart is supple, it can be "broken open" into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.

The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim. And the converse is true as well: no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around- and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our soul.

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.

Community can teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God's word for our lives.

Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings.

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.

becoming one's self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'= If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts and as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few years ago, my daughter and her newborn baby came to live

By attaching our identity to things only a few can have, we ignore the intrinsic preciousness of all human life.

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.

Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. "Why do people want to adopt another culture?" she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. "Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them."5

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for "wholeness" is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means calling that I hear.

truth cannot "be reduced to aphorism or formulas. It is something alive and unpronounceable. Story creates an atmosphere in which [truth] becomes discernible as a pattern."3

the personal can never be divorced from the professional. "We teach who we are" in times of darkness as well as light. In

Be not afraid." As one who is no stranger to fear, I have had to read those words with care so as not to twist them into a discouraging counsel of perfection. "Be not afraid" does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.

I no longer ask, "What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?" Instead I ask, "What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?" The desire to "hang on" comes from a sense of scarcity and fear. The desire to "give myself" comes from a sense of abundance and generosity. That's the kind of truth I want to wither into.

The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.

The God whom I know dwells quietly in the root system of the very nature of things.

Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand—the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.

What happened to "we have nothing to fear but fear itself"?