Top 100 Scott Peck Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Scott Peck

#1. Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost.

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

M. Scott Peck

#6. Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process.

M. Scott Peck

#7. Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.

M. Scott Peck

#8. 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.

M. Scott Peck

#9. I can remember years ago sitting on my bed and suddenly thinking, "I am God."

M. Scott Peck

#10. no problem can be solved until an individual assumes the responsibility for solving it.

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#11. When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.

M. Scott Peck

#12. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and wisdom.

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#13. To the child, abandonment by its parents is the equivalent of death.

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#14. It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion. The process of giving up the self (which is

M. Scott Peck

#15. 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.

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#16. If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.

M. Scott Peck

#17. 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

#18. Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person.

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#19. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination ... the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become one with God.

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#20. For godhood and the hope for mankind, and within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever-present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved.

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#21. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

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#22. 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.

M. Scott Peck

#23. When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

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#24. When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.

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. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

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#27. If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.

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#28. 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 ...

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#29. To nourish the spirit the body must also be nourished.

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#30. I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.

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#31. The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

M. Scott Peck

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Self-discipline is self-caring.

M. Scott Peck

#35. 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

#36. It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.

M. Scott Peck

#37. Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

M. Scott Peck

#38. Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

M. Scott Peck

#39. 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.

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#40. It may sound strange to laymen, but psychotherapists are familiar with the fact that people are routinely terrified by mental health.

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#41. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.

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#42. Many scientists simply do not look at the evidence of the reality of God.

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#43. 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

#44. 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.

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#45. Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.

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#46. 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

#47. The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth.

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#48. In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

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#49. To heal your body, you must first heal your spirit.

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#50. 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.

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#51. 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.

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#52. Love is everywhere. It is the tie that binds us each other, to the world we live in and to something above and beyond the world.

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#53. Benjamin Franklin said, "Those things that hurt, instruct.

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#54. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

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#55. Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?

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#56. We know a great deal more about the causes of physical disease than we do about the causes of physical health.

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#57. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.

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#58. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs

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#59. We are often most in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.

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#60. From the age of three on, as far back as I remember, I just knew there was a God behind everything.

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#61. The giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole life styles ... these are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.

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#62. ...truth is reality

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#63. But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world.

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#64. The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.

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#65. It is not easy for us to change. But it is possible and it is our glory as human beings

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#66. It is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from non-love; it is the aim of the action.

M. Scott Peck

#67. 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

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#68. Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable.

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#69. 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.

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#70. What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.

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#71. 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?

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#72. Laziness is love's opposite.

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#73. My time was my responsibility. It was up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time.

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#74. 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

#75. The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.

M. Scott Peck

#76. If someone is determined not to risk pain, then such a person must do without many things: [ ... ] - all that makes life alive, meaningful and significant.

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#77. Everything that happens in life is there to aid our spiritual growth.

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#78. Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.

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#79. 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

#80. Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.

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#81. Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.

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#82. With total discipline we can solve all problems.

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#83. 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.

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#84. The only real security in life lies in relishing life's insecurity.

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#85. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.

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#86. Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. This

M. Scott Peck

#87. Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.

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#88. Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques
actually defensive bastions against community.

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#89. There is no act of love that is not an act of work or courage. No exceptions.

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#90. A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.

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#91. 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.

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#92. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.

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#93. 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.

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#94. Sickness begets chaos, which, through hard work and a touch of grace, leads to growth and resurrection.

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#95. 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