Quotes from M. Scott Peck

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

A significant regret is that I was not as good a father as I would have ideally liked to be. I was not, I think, a bad father.

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.

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

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.

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.

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.

I never thought I would ever be middle-of-the-road anything, much less a middle-of-the-road Christian, but it actually ended up I'm extremely middle of the road.

Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.

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.

The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.

Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.

Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and wisdom.

Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another person we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person's growth.

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.

If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.

I've gone to great lengths not to be a guru. I think the notion of guruhood is utterly pathological, and I couldn't live that way. I am just a person.

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

Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.

What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.

We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.

I do not think that everybody has to struggle. But to probably at least half of the people, it never seems to enter their minds that they might be engaged in a struggle or that there might be something to struggle with.

Since the early 1960s, since what's been called the charismatic movement within the Christian church, a significant number of Christians believe that virtually every problem a human can have is of demonic origin.