Top 250 M. Scott Peck Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.”

— M. Scott Peck

152. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

153. “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

154. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

155. “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

156. “If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and.”

— M. Scott Peck

157. “I have a very full and busy life and occasionally I am asked, Scotty, how can you do all that you do? The most telling reply I can give is: Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.”

— M. Scott Peck

158. “But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them.”

— M. Scott Peck

159. “If we kill those who are evil, we will become evil ourselves; we will be killers. If we attempt to deal with evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physically. Evil can be defeated by goodness. Evil can be conquered only by love. We must somehow be both tolerant and intolerant, accepting and demanding, strict and flexible. An almost godlike compassion is required.”

— M. Scott Peck

160. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

161. “Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

163. “And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.”

— M. Scott Peck

164. “Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners. No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other’s best critics.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

166. “Children cannot grow to psychological maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the specter of abandonment. Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way the universal issues of marriage – dependency and independency, dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example – without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

168. “It is said that “neurotics make themselves miserable; those with character disorders make everyone else miserable.” Chief among the people character-disordered parents make miserable are their children. As in other areas of their lives, they fail to assume adequate responsibility for their parenting. They tend to brush off their children in thousands of little ways rather than provide them with needed attention.”

— M. Scott Peck

169. “Sooner or later, if they are to be healed, they must learn that the entirety of one’s adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.”

— M. Scott Peck

170. “But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.25.”

— M. Scott Peck

171. “Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.”

— M. Scott Peck

172. “It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This.”

— M. Scott Peck

173. “He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

— M. Scott Peck

174. “They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self-discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again.”

— M. Scott Peck

175. “This inclination to ignore problems is once again a simple manifestation of an unwillingness to delay gratification. Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary.”

— M. Scott Peck

176. “If we seek to be loved – if we expect to be loved – this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving.”

— M. Scott Peck

177. “If they love their children parents must, sparingly and carefully perhaps but nonetheless actively, confront and criticize them from time to time, just as they must allow their children to confront and criticize themselves in turn. Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners.”

— M. Scott Peck

178. “Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word “judicious” means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decisionmaking.”

— M. Scott Peck

179. “The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness.”

— M. Scott Peck

180. “Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.”

— M. Scott Peck

181. “There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God?”

— M. Scott Peck

182. “How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded.”

— M. Scott Peck

183. “Mystics have spoken to us through the ages in terms of paradox. Is it possible that we are beginning to see a meeting ground between science and religion? When we are able to say that “a human is both mortal and eternal at the same time” and “light is both a wave and a particle at the same time,” we have begun to speak the same language. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth that.”

— M. Scott Peck

184. “So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.”

— M. Scott Peck

185. “Being about spiritual growth, this book is inevitably about the other side of the same coin: the impediments to spiritual growth. Ultimately there is only the one impediment, and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome laziness, none of the others will be hurdled.”

— M. Scott Peck

186. “Through grace we are helped not to stumble and through grace we know that we are being welcomed. What more can we ask?”

— M. Scott Peck

187. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

188. “The will to grow is in essence the same phenomenon as love. Love is the will to extend oneself for spiritual growth. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

190. “And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: “Find out your patients’ religions even if they say they don’t have any.”

— M. Scott Peck

191. “Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace – a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair.”

— M. Scott Peck

192. “They will observe how their children eat cake, how they study, when they tell subtle falsehoods, when they run away from problems rather than face them. They will take the time to make these minor corrections and adjustments, listening to their children, responding to them, tightening a little here, loosening a little there, giving them little lectures, little stories, little hugs and kisses, little admonishments, little pats on the back.”

— M. Scott Peck

193. “We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts.”

— M. Scott Peck

194. “While listening is by far the most important form of attention, other forms are also necessary in most loving relationships, particularly with children. The variety of such possible forms is great. One is game-playing.”

— M. Scott Peck

195. “In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.”

— M. Scott Peck

196. “Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”

— M. Scott Peck

197. “Do what you feel called to do, but also be prepared to accept that you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to learn. Be willing to be surprised by forces beyond your control, and realize that a major learning on the journey is the art of surrender.”

— M. Scott Peck

198. “If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need to ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out?”

— M. Scott Peck

199. “If there were but one thing I could hope for from the reader of the remainder of this book, it would be that he or she possesses the capacity to perceive the miraculous.”

— M. Scott Peck

200. “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. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power, although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people, since more often than not they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways.”

— M. Scott Peck