Parker Palmer Quotes

The true teachers and educators are not those who have learned pedagogy as the science of dealing with children, but those in whom pedagogy has awakened through understanding the human being.

...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.

Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

You teach best that which you need most to learn.

At the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, we learned to express ourselves, and I've been expressing myself ever since.

Dreams really tell you about yourself more than anything else in this world could ever tell you.

Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder.

I look for characters that speak to something in me.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

You have nothing to offer if you're just some machine actress.

My concern is how we learn to be genuine human beings.

I am deeply in tune with my heart and core, and it's made me a better writer, artist, and most of all woman. It's made me more myself.

You bring out a lot of your own thoughts and attitudes when acting. I think a great deal of it has to do with the inner you.

The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.

You discover yourself through the research of your work.

I try to put all I am as a person into what I do. My intelligence, my emotion. I've done that in everything.

Your real feelings are inside you.

It is when I am working that the real me comes out - that is when I am the most real and honest.

If I'm not living from my heart, I get sick.

Authenticity is the ability to listen to what nature tells us. Listening isn't the same thing as never making a mistake, but the important thing is to learn.

I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.

Sometimes it seems like we're closer to our manicurists than we are our own souls. We have to find ways to get in touch with that and to listen to it and to hear it.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

I'm learning simplicity and how to wear my body. I'm enjoying life and trying to be the best me.