Top 250 M. Scott Peck Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “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

202. “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

203. “We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.”

— M. Scott Peck

204. “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

205. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

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

— M. Scott Peck

207. “I believe it would be considerably healthier for us to dare to live without a reason for many things than with reasons that are simplistic.”

— M. Scott Peck

208. “If necessary, they will even kill to escape the pain of their own spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them. I define evil, then, as the exercise of.”

— M. Scott Peck

209. “The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything.”

— M. Scott Peck

210. “Or some people may yearn for riches, not for money’s sake but in order to send their children to college or provide themselves with the freedom and time for study and reflection which are necessary for their own spiritual growth. It is not power or money that such people love; it is humanity.”

— M. Scott Peck

211. “Let me simply state that it is wrong to regard any other human being, a priori, as an object, or an ‘It.’ This is so because each and every human being – you, every friend, every stranger, every foreigner – is precious.”

— M. Scott Peck

212. “But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.”

— M. Scott Peck

213. “By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved. I.”

— M. Scott Peck

214. “This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference.”

— M. Scott Peck

215. “You are a beautiful and beloved individual. It is good to be you. We will love you no matter what you do, as long as you are you.”

— M. Scott Peck

216. “When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.”

— M. Scott Peck

217. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

218. “Indeed, if one can say that one has built genuinely loving relationships with a spouse and children, then one has already succeeded in accomplishing more than most people accomplish in a lifetime.”

— M. Scott Peck

219. “In regard to methodology, science has tended to say, “What is very difficult to study doesn’t merit study.” And in regard to natural law, science tends to say, “What is very difficult to understand doesn’t exist.” The church has been a bit more broad-minded. To the religious establishment what cannot be understood in terms of known natural law is a miracle, and miracles do exist.”

— M. Scott Peck

220. “If you work long enough and hard enough to understand yourself, you will come to discover that this vast part of your mind, of which you now have little awareness, contains riches beyond imagination.”

— M. Scott Peck

221. “If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.”

— M. Scott Peck

222. “My time was my responsibility. It was up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time.”

— M. Scott Peck

223. “Efficiency involves attentiveness to those things that must be dealt with before they become such overwhelming problems that they cause far more damage than necessary.”

— M. Scott Peck

224. “But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem.”

— M. Scott Peck

225. “The group made the salesman aware in no uncertain terms that his tendency to avoid problem-solving by ignoring a problem in the hope that it would go away was in itself his major problem.”

— M. Scott Peck

226. “Even when we truly understand these matters, the journey of spiritual growth is still so lonely and difficult that we often become discouraged.”

— M. Scott Peck

227. “Many scientists simply do not look at the evidence of the reality of God.”

— M. Scott Peck

228. “The message they give to their children is: “If you don’t do exactly what I want you to do I won’t love you any more, and you can figure out for yourself what that might mean.” It means, of course, abandonment and death.”

— M. Scott Peck

229. “Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger.”

— M. Scott Peck

230. “And it is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in mankind as human love. Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.”

— M. Scott Peck

231. “How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.”

— M. Scott Peck

232. “The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.”

— M. Scott Peck

233. “We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.”

— M. Scott Peck

234. “Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding.”

— M. Scott Peck

235. “There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them. Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them. Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say.”

— M. Scott Peck

236. “Confronting problems 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

237. “It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination... the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become one with God.”

— M. Scott Peck

238. “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.”

— M. Scott Peck

239. “And I know that I and anyone else who is not mentally defective can solve any problem if we are willing to take the time.”

— M. Scott Peck

240. “It is precisely because I valued myself that I was unwilling to remain miserable in a school and whole social environment that did not fit my needs. It is because the housewife had regard for herself that she refused to tolerate any longer a marriage that so totally limited her freedom and repressed her personality. It is because the businessman cared for himself that he was no longer willing to nearly kill himself in order to meet the expectations of his mother.”

— M. Scott Peck

241. “Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.”

— M. Scott Peck

242. “It may sound strange to laymen, but psychotherapists are familiar with the fact that people are routinely terrified by mental health.”

— M. Scott Peck

243. “And then I realized that Mrs. X. was actually not able to distinguish between Susan and herself. What she felt, Susan must feel. She was using Susan as a vehicle to express her own needs. She was not doing this consciously or maliciously; on an emotional level she could not, in fact, perceive Susan as having an identity separate from her own.”

— M. Scott Peck

244. “Yet even more important than role modeling is love.”

— M. Scott Peck

245. “Why is this? Why do a majority develop a capacity to delay gratification while a substantial minority fail, often irretrievably, to develop this capacity? The answer is not absolutely, scientifically known. The role of genetic factors is unclear. The variables cannot be sufficiently controlled for scientific proof. But most of the signs rather clearly point to the quality of parenting as the determinant.”

— M. Scott Peck

246. “Neurotics, because of their willingness to assume responsibility, may be quite excellent parents if their neuroses are relatively mild and they are not so overwhelmed by unnecessary responsibilities that they have scant energy left for the necessary responsibilities of parenthood.”

— M. Scott Peck

247. “We must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth.”

— M. Scott Peck

248. “The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence.”

— M. Scott Peck

249. “We do this by a variety of means which psychiatrists call defense mechanisms. All of us employ such defenses, thereby limiting our awareness. If in our laziness and fear of suffering we massively defend our awareness, then it will come to pass that our understanding of the world will bear little or no relation to reality.”

— M. Scott Peck

250. “Because our actions are based on our understanding, our behavior will then become unrealistic. When this occurs to a sufficient degree our fellow citizens will recognize that we are “out of touch with reality,” and will deem us mentally ill even though we ourselves are most likely convinced of our sanity.”

— M. Scott Peck