M. Scott Peck famous quotes

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

#Decision #Suffering #Makers

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Motivational

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

#Heart #Mind #Emptiness

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

#Race #Community #Enemy

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Spiritual #Encouragement #Truth

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Pain #Adversity #Cutting

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Commitment #Community #Together

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

#Inspirational #Happiness #Spiritual

Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Relationship #Commitment #Inherent

Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Inspiring #Courage #Action

The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Spiritual #Growth #Path

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

#Spiritual #Pain #Attitude

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Spiritual #Love Is #Self

Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs
-- M. Scott Peck

#Reality #Dedication #Cost

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

#Profound #Superstitions #Prejudice

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

#Responsibility #Mean #Organization

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Soulmate #Acceptance #Differences

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Journey #Self #Answers

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Thinking #Hands #Evil

Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Inspirational #Discipline #Vices

Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Adventure #Frightening

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.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Life #Happiness #God

The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Reality #Appreciate #Effort

Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Falling In Love #Love Is #Limits

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

#Cute Love #Best Love #Sweet Love

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

#Wall #Communication #Purpose

Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Inspirational #Doubt

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

#Life Is #Truth Is #Difficult

An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Lying #White #Order

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?
-- M. Scott Peck

#Motivational #Track #Want

When you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself in all ways that are necessary.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Care #Way #Valuable

The only real security in life lies in relishing life's insecurity.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Real #Lying #Insecurity

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

#Pain #Procrastination #Way

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

#Unique #Two #Expectations

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture
-- M. Scott Peck

#Christian #People #Evil

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Love #Relationship #Soulmate

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Inspirational #Peace #Community

The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Pain #Lying #Responsibility

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

#Change #Integrity #Humble

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Inspirational #Time #Communication

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

#Change #Forever #Growth

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Life #Growing Up #Problem

It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Community #Essentials #Tasks

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

#Growing Up #Years #Ongoing

The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cures. 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

#Spiritual #Self #Long

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

#Giving #Listening #Important

We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Life #Motivational #Change

Ultimately love is everything.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Love #Love Is #Confusion

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

#Leadership #Mean #Facts

Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Love #Spiritual #Real

The key to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace
-- M. Scott Peck

#Acceptance #Differences #Keys

Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Spiritual #Pain #Attitude

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

#Bitterness #Ends

Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Life #Appreciation #Thinking

Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.
-- M. Scott Peck

#Religious #Believe #Imagination