M. Scott Peck
If you are determined not to risk pain, then you must do without many things: having children, getting married, the ecstasy of sex, the hope of ambition, friendship-all that makes life alive, meaningful and significant.Collection: Meaningful
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded.Collection: Strange
There is no act of love that is not an act of work or courage. No exceptions.Collection: Acts Of Love
The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.Collection: Action
The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.Collection: Unique
All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I was never going to grow up--that growing is an ever ongoing process.Collection: Growing Up
We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength.Collection: Source
Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.Collection: Cute Love
Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually cultivates it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.Collection: Spiritual
What does a life of total dedication to truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.Collection: Mean
We cannot solve a problem by saying, "It's not my problem." We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say, "This is my problem and it's up to me to solve it."Collection: Confusion
When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion - through the fact that for that someone (or for ourself) we take an extra step or walk an extra mile. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.Collection: Real
The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.Collection: Essence
Often the most loving thing we can do when a friend is in pain is to share the pain-to be there even when we have nothing to offer except our presence and even when being there is painful to ourselves.Collection: Pain
I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar.Collection: Running
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.Collection: Community
The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.Collection: Spiritual
Everything that happens in life is there to aid our spiritual growth.Collection: Spiritual
We skim over the surface thoughtlessly. But we must acknowledge that thinking well is a time-consuming process. We can't expect instant results. We have to slow down a bit, and take the time to contemplate, meditate, and even pray. It is the only route to a more meaningful and efficient existence.Collection: Meaningful
Whenever we think of ourselves as doing something for someone else, we are in some way denying our own responsibility. Whatever we do is done because we choose to do it, and we make that choice because it is the one that satisfies us the most.Collection: Responsibility
The feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself- including things like using your time well. In this way, self-discipline is self-caring.Collection: Love You
When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.Collection: Care
Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?Collection: Motivational
To heal your body, you must first heal your spirit.Collection: Body
Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly.Collection: Leadership
Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.Collection: Religious
The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another person we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person's growth.Collection: Giving
When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil.Collection: Organization
I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.Collection: Easy Answers
I believe it would be considerably healthier for us to dare to live without a reason for many things than with reasons that are simplistic.Collection: Believe
As Benjamin Franklin said, 'Those things that hurt, instruct.' It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.Collection: Wise
With total discipline we can solve all problems.Collection: Discipline
Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.Collection: Love
Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.Collection: Love
I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.Collection: Love
If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need to ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out?Collection: Integrity
Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within.Collection: World
It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.Collection: Community
As I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.Collection: Joy
When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.Collection: Spiritual
Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.Collection: Spiritual
Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.Collection: Inspirational
From the age of three on, as far back as I remember, I just knew there was a God behind everything.Collection: Age
Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.Collection: Hard Work
The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.Collection: Lying
I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.Collection: God
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.Collection: Spiritual
The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.Collection: Reality
The time and the quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicate to children the degree to which they are valued by their parents. . . . When children know that they are valued, when they truly feel valued in the deepest parts of themselves, then they feel valuable. This knowledge is worth more than any gold.Collection: Children