Parker Palmer Quotes

It's not the skunk's fault that he's a skunk or that he gives off this really bad stink. If I am a skunk, I want to live as a skunk, I want to know what my truth is, to know the person I am without fear.

You cannot fail at being yourself. A cat doesn't try to be a tiger, and you shouldn't try to be something you aren't. You are a process, not a product. Your job is to discover what you are and create that creature. You still won't be perfect, but success isn't about perfection-it is about authenticity. You are a success if you are being your real, authentic self.

To be rather than to seem.

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

You can become so manipulated and controlled by what you think other people expect you to do that you literally live under the tyranny of other people's expectations. And what I call the shoulds and the oughts. I believe that hundreds of thousands of people miss their God-ordained destiny and they never really feel satisfied, content and fulfilled, because they're so busy trying to keep everybody else satisfied with them that they don't ever get around to doing what they really want to do.

Lies. Mab cannot change who you are.

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are.

Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

Many people know what they want to have, but have no idea of who they want to be. Getting 'things' simply will not fulfill you. Only living and doing what you believe is 'the right thing' will give you that sense of inner strength that we all deserve.

In trying to express only those aspects of ourselves that we believe will guarantee us the acceptance of others, we suppress some of our most valuable and interesting features and sentence ourselves to a life of reenacting the same outworn scripts. Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential. Once befriended, our shadow becomes a divine map that—when properly read and followed—reconnects us to the life we were meant to live and the people we were meant to be.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you're supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.

I think we just have to remember who the heck we are and speak to who we are and what we believe.

The more room you give yourself to express your true thoughts and feelings, the more room there is for your wisdom to emerge.

Don't be imitators. The mind is an imitator, because it is easier to play the game of imitation than to become authentically true. Many ideas have been given to you: become like a Buddha, become like Jesus. become like Krishna - as if you have to become everybody else EXCEPT yourself. As if God is only against you. He's for Krishna, for Christ, for Mahavir, for Buddha - only against you. Then why does He create you? Then He seems simply foolish. Why does He go on creating you? If He's interested in Buddha, Hc can create Buddhas. Why you?

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.

To get at the truth of your calling, you have to crack open that false self and see what lies within.

When you're on a boat, 15 nautical miles off the coast and you're with a bunch of fishermen, they don't give two shits about who you are.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

Let's stop believing that our differences make us superior or inferior to one another. Let's not be afraid that our different colors make us different people. Who cares? It's just a lie, and we don't have to believe all the lies and superstitions that control our lives.

I'm not trying to be something I'm not. I know what I believe in. I know my morals and I know what I have to offer.