Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by M. Scott Peck - Page 3

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

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

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.

With total discipline we can solve all problems.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others.

To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing.

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.

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

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.

Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within.

Love always requires courage and involves risk.

If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.

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

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

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

If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.

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

Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.

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.

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

If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be 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.

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.

Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable.

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

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

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

Teach us to number our days aright.

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.

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

Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.

There is no virtue inherent in un-constructive suffering.

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

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truely loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. ...Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.

I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible. It no more has horns, hooves and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless.

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.

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

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.

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.

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

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

I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.

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.

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