Top 120 Parker J. Palmer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

52. “Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one’s mind and one’s feelings.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

55. “Here, I think, is 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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

56. “I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.”

— Parker J. Palmer

57. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

58. “The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out – a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.”

— Parker J. Palmer

59. “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.”

— Parker J. Palmer

60. “She meant that her soul was tired, her heart was tired, her whole being was tired...”

— Parker J. Palmer

61. “The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”

— Parker J. Palmer

62. “Today education has become a training ground for competition.”

— Parker J. Palmer

63. “When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world-in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life-as we are called back to our “hidden wholeness” amid the violence of the storm.”

— Parker J. Palmer

64. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

65. “I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.”

— Parker J. Palmer

66. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

67. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.14.”

— Parker J. Palmer

68. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

69. “We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.”

— Parker J. Palmer

70. “The more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.”

— Parker J. Palmer

71. “The past isn’t fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

73. “If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death. What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life.”

— Parker J. Palmer

74. “Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.”

— Parker J. Palmer

75. “The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

77. “The civility we need will not come from watching our tongues. It will come from valuing our differences.”

— Parker J. Palmer

78. “I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours – which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life – ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.”

— Parker J. Palmer

79. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

80. “Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.”

— Parker J. Palmer

81. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

82. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

83. “Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?”

— Parker J. Palmer

84. “I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.”

— Parker J. Palmer

85. “As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots.”

— Parker J. Palmer

86. “Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.”

— Parker J. Palmer

87. “But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy-but it is the part of the story most often left untold.”

— Parker J. Palmer

88. “We are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. But choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid.”

— Parker J. Palmer

89. “Good teaching comes from good people.”

— Parker J. Palmer

90. “A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open-divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within-things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.”

— Parker J. Palmer

91. “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.”

— Parker J. Palmer

92. “The English word “truth” comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word “troth,” as in the ancient vow “I pledge thee my troth.” With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in mutually accountable and transforming relationship... to know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one’s whole self... to know in truth is to be known as well.”

— Parker J. Palmer

93. “The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of “self-impersonation,” and betray our identities.2.”

— Parker J. Palmer

94. “I am blessed to live in a democracy, not a totalitarian state. But the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by a brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb.”

— Parker J. Palmer

95. “What happened to “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”?”

— Parker J. Palmer

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

— Parker J. Palmer

97. “One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess-the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”

— Parker J. Palmer

98. “The writer Anne Lamott says, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”28.”

— Parker J. Palmer

99. “Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it’s needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again – if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words.”

— Parker J. Palmer

100. “One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, life became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others.”

— Parker J. Palmer