M. Scott Peck Quotes

By far the most important form of attention we can give our loved ones is listening... True listening is love in action.

Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.

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.

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.

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.

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.

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.

America's greatest sin is the refusal to delay gratification.

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

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

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

In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.

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.

Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call.

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.

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

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.

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

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.

The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.

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

When we cling, often forever, to our old patterns of thinking and behaving, we fall to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity.

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.

Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. ... They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of self-awareness. ... [E]vil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme.

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

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

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.

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."

True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.

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

A discussion becomes destructive when it begins to generate more heat than light.

Integrity is never painless.

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.

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

Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom

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.

Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.

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.

It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

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

In and through community lies the salvation of the world.

As I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.

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

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

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

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

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.