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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Parker J. Palmer

Image
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
Image
I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
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
Image
The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
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
Image
I have to say that I have been blessed with significant teachers at every stage of my life.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
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
Image
We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
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
Image
God ain't finished with any of us yet.
Parker J. Palmer
Image
Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
Parker J. Palmer