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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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Parker J. Palmer
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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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Every young person needs some adult who's just wild and crazy about them!
Parker J. Palmer
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God ain't finished with any of us yet.
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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Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
Parker J. Palmer
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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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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?
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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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
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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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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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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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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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The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.
Parker J. Palmer
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... the stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility
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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Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
Parker J. Palmer
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When you are with young people, it is almost inconceivable that things wouldn't arise that you'd have to respond to, such as someone wrestling on the bus. And how you handle that, how you respond to that, how you deal with that is a lesson to the people you are on the bus with.
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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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer