Top 250 M. Scott Peck Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.”

— M. Scott Peck

102. “True listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

104. “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.”

— M. Scott Peck

105. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

106. “There really are people, and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. They do this not with conscious malice but blindly, lacking awareness of their own evil – indeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness.”

— M. Scott Peck

107. “We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.”

— M. Scott Peck

108. “The tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since all of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, all of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree.”- M. Scott Peck.”

— M. Scott Peck

109. “America’s greatest sin is the refusal to delay gratification.”

— M. Scott Peck

110. “I guess if you want to know one single thing I’m about, it’s that I’m against easy answers.”

— M. Scott Peck

111. “The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.”

— M. Scott Peck

112. “To nourish the spirit the body must also be nourished.”

— M. Scott Peck

113. “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

114. “But while all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that. Much of our fear is fear of a change in the status quo, a fear that we might lose what we have if we venture forth from where we are now. In the section on discipline I spoke of the fact.”

— M. Scott Peck

115. “Those things that hurt, instruct.”

— M. Scott Peck

116. “We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

118. “For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.”

— M. Scott Peck

119. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

120. “Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder... When neurotics are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that they are at fault. When those with character disorders are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that the world is at fault.”

— M. Scott Peck

121. “This feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when one considers oneself valuable one will take care of oneself in all ways that are necessary.”

— M. Scott Peck

122. “Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. This.”

— M. Scott Peck

123. “For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It.”

— M. Scott Peck

124. “As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

126. “Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate 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

127. “Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.”

— M. Scott Peck

128. “If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.”

— M. Scott Peck

129. “The feeling of being valuable – “I am a valuable person” – is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. It is a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood; it is extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. Conversely, when children have learned through the love of their parents to feel valuable, it is almost impossible for the vicissitudes of adulthood to destroy their spirit.”

— M. Scott Peck

130. “There is no virtue inherent in un-constructive suffering.”

— M. Scott Peck

131. “Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.”

— M. Scott Peck

132. “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...”

— M. Scott Peck

133. “The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a “love object,” is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis.”

— M. Scott Peck

134. “There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools whose application demands extensive training. To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of.”

— M. Scott Peck

135. “To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring.”

— M. Scott Peck

136. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

137. “Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.”

— M. Scott Peck

138. “Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. It becomes abnormal or unhealthy only when something interferes with the giving-up process, with the result that the depression is prolonged and cannot be resolved by completion of the.”

— M. Scott Peck

139. “In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”2.”

— M. Scott Peck

140. “Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age. Sadly, most do not take this opportunity.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

143. “Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live,” said Seneca two millennia ago, “and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die.”

— M. Scott Peck

144. “Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it.”

— M. Scott Peck

145. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

146. “Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.”

— M. Scott Peck

147. “A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers.”

— M. Scott Peck

148. “A full life will be full of pain. But the only alternative is not to live fully or not to live at all.”

— M. Scott Peck

149. “Specifically, one whose life is ruled and dictated by dependency needs suffers from a psychiatric disorder to which we ascribe the diagnostic name “passive dependent personality disorder.” It is perhaps the most common of all psychiatric disorders. People with this disorder, passive dependent people, are so busy seeking to be loved that they have no energy left to love.”

— M. Scott Peck

150. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck