Parker Palmer: Quotes about reality

Parker Palmer is American theologian. Explore interesting quotes on reality.
Parker Palmer: 44   quotes 0   likes

“I was fired because that job had little to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, what I care and do not care about. My resort to adolescent rebellion reflected that simple fact. … I was laughing to keep myself sane. Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist “ought” to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. Those feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether. Obviously I should have dealt with my feeling more directly and exercised more self-control. Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. At that time of my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness—and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am.”

Parker Palmer

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 40-41

Life , Way , Feeling , Exercises

“The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.”

Parker Palmer

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 50

Nature , Reality

“When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.”

Parker Palmer

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 49-50

Nature , Reality

“Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”

Parker Palmer

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 54

Life , World , Soul , Reality

“Reality—including one’s own—is divine, not to be defied but honored.”

Parker Palmer

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 51

Reality