M. Scott Peck Quotes
“Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. ”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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. ”
“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.”
“Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truely loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. …Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.”
“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.”
“The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior. ”
“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. ”
“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.”
“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.”
“It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. ”
“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. ”
“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.”