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It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.

Parker J. Palmer

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Parker J. Palmer
Heart
Hearts
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More quotes by 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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I have to say that I have been blessed with significant teachers at every stage of my life.
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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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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My favorite topping is one that a lot of people don't like. I love anchovies.
Parker J. Palmer
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What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?
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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Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.
Parker J. Palmer
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The teachers who have had the most impact on me and on most learners I know are teachers whose selfhoods have been deeply invested in what they are doing.
Parker J. Palmer
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Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
Parker J. Palmer
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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.
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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When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'
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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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 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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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
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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 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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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