Top 120 Parker J. Palmer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

3. “Self-care is never a selfish act – it is only good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

6. “Is the life I’m living the life that wants to live in me?”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

8. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

9. “One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to “fix” it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery.”

— Parker J. Palmer

10. “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness – mine, yours, ours – need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

13. “We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.”

— Parker J. Palmer

14. “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks – we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”

— Parker J. Palmer

15. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

17. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

18. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

20. “Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

22. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

23. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

24. “I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.”

— Parker J. Palmer

25. “Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already posses.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

27. “What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?”

— Parker J. Palmer

28. “Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.”

— Parker J. Palmer

29. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

30. “We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.”

— Parker J. Palmer

31. “Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

33. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

34. “Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one’s inwardness.”

— Parker J. Palmer

35. “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

38. “We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are.”

— Parker J. Palmer

39. “We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

41. “It’s more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right.”

— Parker J. Palmer

42. “Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.”

— Parker J. Palmer

43. “Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now – in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.”

— Parker J. Palmer

44. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

45. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

46. “Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.”

— Parker J. Palmer

47. “What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.”

— Parker J. Palmer

48. “Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

— Parker J. Palmer

49. “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”

— Parker J. Palmer

50. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”

— Parker J. Palmer