Top 100 M. Scott Peck Quotes
#1. I have defined love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love.
M. Scott Peck
#2. 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?
M. Scott Peck
#3. The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
M. Scott Peck
#4. Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable.
M. Scott Peck
#5. Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture
M. Scott Peck
#6. But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.
M. Scott Peck
#8. We are often most in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.
M. Scott Peck
#9. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.
M. Scott Peck
#10. Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?
M. Scott Peck
#11. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.
M. Scott Peck
#12. Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.
M. Scott Peck
#14. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
M. Scott Peck
#15. 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."
M. Scott Peck
#16. Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
M. Scott Peck
#17. A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.
M. Scott Peck
#18. Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. This
M. Scott Peck
#19. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.
M. Scott Peck
#20. The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.
M. Scott Peck
#21. Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
M. Scott Peck
#22. The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.
M. Scott Peck
#23. Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
M. Scott Peck
#24. Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain.
M. Scott Peck
#25. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#26. When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.
M. Scott Peck
#27. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
M. Scott Peck
#28. Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person.
M. Scott Peck
#29. Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth ... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will
namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
M. Scott Peck
#30. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#31. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and wisdom.
M. Scott Peck
#32. I can remember years ago sitting on my bed and suddenly thinking, "I am God."
M. Scott Peck
#34. Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.
M. Scott Peck
#35. It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This
M. Scott Peck
#36. I am dubious as to how far we can move toward global community-which is the only way to achieve international peace-until we learn the basic principles of community in our own individual lives and personal spheres of influence.
M. Scott Peck
#37. If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and
M. Scott Peck
#38. The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
M. Scott Peck
#39. To heal your body, you must first heal your spirit.
M. Scott Peck
#40. Good discipline requires time. When we have no time to give our children, or no time that we are willing to give, we don't even observe them closely enough to become aware of when their need for our disciplinary assistance is expressed subtley.
M. Scott Peck
#41. Another characteristic of human nature - perhaps the one that makes us most human - is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
M. Scott Peck
#42. The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One
M. Scott Peck
#43. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
M. Scott Peck
#44. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
M. Scott Peck
#45. It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
M. Scott Peck
#46. Do what you feel called to do, but also be prepared to accept that you don't necessarily know what you're going to learn. Be willing to be surprised by forces beyond your control, and realize that a major learning on the journey is the art of surrender.
M. Scott Peck
#47. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#48. An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes.
M. Scott Peck
#49. I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.
M. Scott Peck
#50. When we love something it is of value to us, and when something is of value to us we spend time with it, time enjoying it and time taking care of it ...
M. Scott Peck
#51. God creates each soul differently, so that when all the mud is finally cleared away, His light will shine through it in a beautiful, colorful, totally new pattern.
M. Scott Peck
#52. the healthy self, however, must always be vigilant against the laziness of the sick self that still lurks within us.
M. Scott Peck
#53. Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership.
M. Scott Peck
#54. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#56. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#57. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger.
M. Scott Peck
#58. Let me simply state that it is wrong to regard any other human being, a priori, as an object, or an 'It.' This is so because each and every human being - you, every friend, every stranger, every foreigner - is precious.
M. Scott Peck
#59. And I know that I and anyone else who is not mentally defective can solve any problem if we are willing to take the time.
M. Scott Peck
#60. When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word ... "glory."
M. Scott Peck
#61. Third, this unitary definition of love includes self-love with love for the other. Since I am human and you are human, to love humans means to love myself as well as you.
M. Scott Peck
#62. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.25
M. Scott Peck
#63. Scientists have grave difficulty dealing with the reality of God.
M. Scott Peck
#64. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#65. But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.
M. Scott Peck
#66. We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
M. Scott Peck
#67. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#68. The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
M. Scott Peck
#69. Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
M. Scott Peck
#70. Love always requires courage and involves risk.
M. Scott Peck
#71. As I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.
M. Scott Peck
#72. Life is difficult. This is the great truth, one of the greatest truths-it is a great truth because once we see this truth, we transcend it.
M. Scott Peck
#73. America's greatest sin is the refusal to delay gratification.
M. Scott Peck
#74. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#76. There is no virtue inherent in un-constructive suffering.
M. Scott Peck
#77. Yet even more important than role modeling is love.
M. Scott Peck
#78. We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength.
M. Scott Peck
#79. If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.
M. Scott Peck
#80. The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness.
M. Scott Peck
#82. I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.
M. Scott Peck
#83. A full life will be full of pain. But the only alternative is not to live fully or not to live at all.
M. Scott Peck
#84. Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy.
M. Scott Peck
#85. The key to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace
M. Scott Peck
#86. Most people want peace without the aloneness of [spiritual] power. And they want the self-confidence of adulthood without having to grow up.
M. Scott Peck
#87. Mental Health is dedication to reality at all costs.
M. Scott Peck
#88. In and through community lies the salvation of the world.
M. Scott Peck
#89. We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
M. Scott Peck
#90. For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It
M. Scott Peck
#91. Whatever action we take may influence the course of civilization.
M. Scott Peck
#94. The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything.
M. Scott Peck
#95. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.
M. Scott Peck
#96. A discussion becomes destructive when it begins to generate more heat than light.
M. Scott Peck
#97. 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.
M. Scott Peck
#98. But while all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that. Much of our fear is fear of a change in the status quo, a fear that we might lose what we have if we venture forth from where we are now. In the section on discipline I spoke of the fact
M. Scott Peck
#99. Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom
M. Scott Peck
#100. God wants us to become himself or herself or itself. We are growing toward Godhood. God is the goal of evolution.
M. Scott Peck
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