Quotes from M. Scott Peck

If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.

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

Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable.

Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain.

Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually cultivates it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.

Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the 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.

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

Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Love always requires courage and involves risk.

Life is difficult.

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

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.

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength.

When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

It is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from non-love; it is the aim of the action.

In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.

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.

There is no virtue inherent in un-constructive suffering.

Those things that hurt, instruct.

We are often most in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.

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.

True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.