M. Scott Peck Quotes

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.

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

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. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

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.

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.

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.

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.

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

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.

Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.

All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach.

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.

There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.

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

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.

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.

The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.

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

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.

Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another...The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.

Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.

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

Integrity is never painless.