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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

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Parker J. Palmer
Listen
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More quotes by Parker J. Palmer

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I like to say that before we can create an external space in which to receive people, we have to create an internal space in which to receive them.
Parker J. Palmer
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Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.
Parker J. Palmer
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Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the 'integrity that comes from being what you are.
Parker J. Palmer
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My high school, like most high schools, had a pretty rigid stratification system. Kids were clustered into groups - the studious ones, the athletes, the popular ones - and we never crossed paths with each other. You stayed in your air-tight group, and you were suspicious of people in other groups.
Parker J. Palmer
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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
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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer
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I understand that there are forms of entertainment that can make people weep or jazz them up so they feel like they have had an experience. But I also know that an hour later that's faded and you are back to the difficult realities of your own life. And we need to help people know how to go beyond those difficulties to a place where God dwells.
Parker J. Palmer
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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
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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
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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
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You are much more likely to have a holy experience in a quiet, focused, and communal context than you are when you are being entertained.
Parker J. Palmer
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When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'
Parker J. Palmer
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A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.
Parker J. Palmer
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Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
Parker J. Palmer
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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
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Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.
Parker J. Palmer
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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
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I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Parker J. Palmer
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There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.
Parker J. Palmer
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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