Good teaching comes from good people. — Parker J. Palmer

I don’t do a lot of top–down teaching. — Parker J. Palmer

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique,–good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. — Parker J. Palmer

Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one’s inwardness. — Parker J. Palmer

We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed. — Parker J. Palmer

There are a million ‘oughts’ in the world. There’s a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I’m gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million. — Parker Palmer

Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known. — Parker J. Palmer

Why does a literary scholar study the world of ‘fiction’? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination. — Parker J. Palmer

Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. — Parker J. Palmer

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

I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy. — Parker J. Palmer

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does––maybe more. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. — Parker J. Palmer

Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. — Parker J. Palmer

Is the life I’m living the life that wants to live in me? — Parker J. Palmer

The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin. — Parker J. Palmer

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

I have to say that I have been blessed with significant teachers at every stage of my life. — Parker J. Palmer

Don’t let anyone or anything rob you of the beauty and meaning at the heart of life. It’s your birthright gift. — Parker J. Palmer

Even when life challenges us, it’s a gift beyond all measure. — Parker Palmer

Proposing inner–life solutions to our political and economic catastrophes is something done, say the critics, only by people who’ve spent more time in la–la land than in the ‘real world.’ — Parker Palmer

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. — Parker J. Palmer

The past isn’t fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds. — Parker J. Palmer

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a ‘Be–still–and–know–that–I–am–God’ mindset. — Parker J. Palmer

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are. — Parker J. Palmer

At its deepest level, I think teaching is about bringing people into communion with each other, with yourself as the teacher, and with the subject you are teaching. — Parker J. Palmer

For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I’m teaching, and the larger world. — Parker J. Palmer

Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life. — Parker J. Palmer

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Community doesn’t just create abundance–community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed. — Parker J. Palmer

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

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion. — Parker J. Palmer

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

The ancient human question ‘Who am I?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question ‘Whose am I?’–for there is no self outside of relationship. — Parker J. Palmer

The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart. — Parker J. Palmer

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive. — Parker J. Palmer

By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give. — Parker J. Palmer

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details. — Parker J. Palmer