Parker J. Palmer Quotes - Page 3

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.

Opposing what's wrong is a halfway measure at best. A rebel must also have a vision for something better, a strategy for moving toward that vision and a capacity to rally and join with others in achieving it. If the anger that drives rebellion is not transformed into the hope that inspires movement communities, it will do more harm than good.

In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives

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.

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

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

Students want to know, "Are you painting by the numbers, or are you really present as a human being to what you are doing; and is it coming from inside of you?" So I would ask teachers this question: "Do you have a wellgrounded personal experience and conviction concerning whatever it is you are trying to teach?"

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

In a culture of technique, we often confuse authority with power, but the two are not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out. . . . I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my inner teacher and therefore with my own authority. In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades. . . . Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation.

People are always asking, "Is this person in front of me the same on the inside as he or she appears to be on the outside? Is there congruence between what's within that person and the words and actions I'm viewing and hearing externally?" Children ask that about their parents; students ask it about their teachers; parishioners ask it about their pastors and priests; employees ask it about their bosses; and in a democracy, citizens ask it about their political leaders.

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

Technology is incredibly creative and has great potentials; but it is also very seductive in the way it isolates people, in the way it jazzes people up, in the way it makes junkies out of us - junkies who need a constant stimulation, more information, more bells and whistles, more electronic wonders in order not to be bored.

There's a lot of fear connected with the inner journey because it penetrates our illusions. Taking the inner journey will lead you into some very shadowy places. You're going to learn things about yourself that you'll wish you didn't know. There are monsters in there-monsters you can't control-but trying to keep them hidden will only give them greater power.

Everybody is on a lifelong journey toward trying to live more deeply. There is nobody who can say, "Well, I've got that one checked off my to-do list." We have to be honest with ourselves about where we are on this journey and about the difficulty of living in our own identities and integrity.

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

When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'

As a young man, I yearned for the day when, rooted in the experience that comes only with age, I could do my work fearlessly. But today, in my mid-sixties, I realize that I will feel fear from time to time for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of my fear. But . . . I can learn to walk into it and through it whenever it rises up . . . naming the inner force that triggers . . . fear . . . Naming our fears aloud . . . is the first step toward transcending them.

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.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

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

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.

When there is a gap between what's on the outside and what's on the inside, that's when people retreat into their foxholes because it is an unsafe situation. You don't know what you are dealing with. What you see is not what you are going to get. And that is when people start withdrawing.

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

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

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