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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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Parker J. Palmer
Illusion
Happiness
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Reality
Never
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Ultimately
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More quotes by 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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Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?
Parker J. Palmer
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God ain't finished with any of us yet.
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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The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Parker J. Palmer
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Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.
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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Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
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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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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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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... 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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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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My favorite topping is one that a lot of people don't like. I love anchovies.
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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We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
Parker J. Palmer
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One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery.
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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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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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