Top 250 M. Scott Peck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Self-Esteem Quotes, Self-Care Quotes, Personal Responsibility Quotes, Wednesday Motivational Quotes, Know Your Worth Quotes

2. “If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.”

— M. Scott Peck

3. “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

4. “Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.”

— M. Scott Peck

Featured in: Acceptance Quotes, Soulmate Quotes

5. “Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly.”

— M. Scott Peck

6. “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

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes

7. “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”

— M. Scott Peck

Featured in: Psychology Quotes

8. “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

9. “Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and 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

10. “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

11. “The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.”

— M. Scott Peck

12. “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

13. “Self-discipline is self-caring.”

— M. Scott Peck

14. “You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.”

— M. Scott Peck

15. “Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.”

— M. Scott Peck

16. “Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost.”

— M. Scott Peck

17. “Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.”

— M. Scott Peck

18. “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

19. “All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach.”

— M. Scott Peck

20. “Ultimately love is everything.”

— M. Scott Peck

21. “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

22. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

23. “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

24. “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

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

— M. Scott Peck

26. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

27. “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.” -’The Road Less Traveled.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

29. “Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom.”

— M. Scott Peck

30. “Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.”

— M. Scott Peck

31. “Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.”

— M. Scott Peck

32. “Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.”

— M. Scott Peck

33. “The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

— M. Scott Peck

34. “To heal your body, you must first heal your spirit.”

— M. Scott Peck

35. “One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them.”

— M. Scott Peck

36. “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

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

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

40. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

42. “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

43. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

44. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

46. “Teach us to number our days aright.”

— M. Scott Peck

47. “The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive.”

— M. Scott Peck

48. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

49. “God wants us to become himself or herself or itself. We are growing toward Godhood. God is the goal of evolution.”

— M. Scott Peck

50. “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