Quote

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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Parker J. Palmer
Sometimes
Present
Must
Simply
Trying
Stand
Respectfully
Things
Pain
Edge
Another
Edges
Persons
Hardest
Person
Misery
Without
Mystery

More quotes by Parker J. Palmer

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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.
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I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
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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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God ain't finished with any of us yet.
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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.
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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
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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Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
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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Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
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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I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.
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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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 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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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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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 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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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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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