Parker Palmer Quotes

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "dark night of the soul" - it's a reality for many, many people.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul.

The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.

There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

Pity for him who one day looks uponhis inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.

It seems to me that doubt is worse than trial. I had sooner suffer any affliction than be left to question the gospel or my own interest in it.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

Each of us bears his own Hell.

To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for?

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.