Favorite Quotes from 'Let Your Life Speak' by Parker J. Palmer
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
My top 9 quotes from a graciously short, yet amazingly potent book.
“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.” (p. 29)
“If you are here unfaithfully with us, you’re causing terrible damage.” (p. 31, from the poet Rumi)
“. . . people who plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision: they decide to live ‘divided no more.’ They decide to no longer act on the outside that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the inside.” (p. 32)
“But I wanted more than a job. I wanted deeper congruence between my inner and outer life.”
“. . . burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.” (p. 49)
“One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality - including one’s own - is divine, to be not defied, but honored.” (p. 51)
“I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to ‘the Word become flesh’?” (p. 67)
“True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one’s peril.” (p. 69)
“The irony, often tragic, is that by embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear. If I hoard material goods, others will have too little and I will never have enough. If I fight my way up the ladder of power, others will be defeated and I will never feel secure. If I get jealous of someone I love, I am likely to drive that person away. If I cling to the words I have written as if they were the last of their kind, the pool of new possibilities will surely go dry. We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others for resources as if we were stranded in the Sahara at the last oasis.” (p. 107)
(Picture from Google Images, Amazon.)