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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
Tell
Must
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Life
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Telling

More quotes by 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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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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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.
Parker J. Palmer
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Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.
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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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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Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
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
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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. 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
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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
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We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.
Parker J. Palmer
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We can teach a good, formal lesson on forgiveness as a Christian virtue and all the doctrines that are attached to it. But to be in a real-life situation, a work camp or a trip or some other activity with young people where real forgiveness needs to happen, that's a different situation altogether. And that is where the deepest learning will occur.
Parker J. Palmer
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Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.
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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Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
Parker J. Palmer
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Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.
Parker J. Palmer
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Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?
Parker J. Palmer
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Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
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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My favorite topping is one that a lot of people don't like. I love anchovies.
Parker J. Palmer