M Scott Peck Love Quotes and Sayings
M Scott Peck Love Quotes and Sayings
#1 Resistance to Grace, The Road Less Traveled [S]
1. Love is the will to extend oneself for spiritual growth. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.
#2 Love Defined, The Road Less Traveled [S]
2. 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.
#3 Love is not a feeling, The Road Less Traveled [S]
3. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feehng is present.
#4 Dependency, The Road Less Traveled [S]
4. 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.
#5 The Sins of the Father, The Road Less Traveled [S]
5. Ultimately love is everything.
#6 Falling in “Love”, The Road Less Traveled [S]
6. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.
#7 More About Ego Boundaries, The Road Less Traveled [S]
7. …Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.
#8 Renunciation and Rebirth, The Road Less Traveled [S]
8. 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.
#9 The Road Less Traveled [S]
9. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate 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.
#10 The Risk of Confrontation, The Road Less Traveled [S]
10. If we are to love we must extend ourselves to adjust our communication to the capacities of our beloved.
#11 Love is Not a Feeling, The Road Less Traveled [S]
11. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.
#12 Love Defined, The Road Less Traveled [S]
12. Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.
#13-14 The True Meaning of Community, The Different Drum [S]
13. How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded!
Vulnerability is a two-way street. Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the capacity to be affected by the wounds of others, to be wounded by their wounds.
14. There is pain in our wounds. But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
#15 Emptiness, The Different Drum [S]
15. We cannot even let the other person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
#16 The Hole in the Mind, A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered [S]
16. 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.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Morgan Scott Peck (23 May 1936 – 25 September 2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author, best known for his first book, The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978.
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Sayings by M. Scott Peck
#1 Community and Communication, The Different Drum [S]
1. The overall purpose of human communication is—or should be—reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls and barriers of misunderstanding that unduly separate us human beings one from another.
#2 Prevention of Group Evil, The People Of The Lie [S]
2. …the whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual. This is known to the genuinely religious. It is for this reason that no possible activity is considered to be more important than the salvation of a single human soul. This is why the individual is sacred. 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.
#3 The Risk of Loss, The Road Less Traveled [S]
3. Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future.
#4 The Work of Attention, The Road Less Traveled [S]
4. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.
#5 Problems and Pain, The Road Less Traveled [S]
5. Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its 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. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
#6 Problems and Pain, The Road Less Traveled [S]
6. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
#7 Problem-Solving and Time, The Road Less Traveled [S]
7. 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.
#8 The Work of Attention, The Road Less Traveled [S]
8. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
#9 Problems and Pain, The Road Less Traveled [S]
9. 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.
#10 Escape from Freedom, The Road Less Traveled [S]
10. The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
#11 Love Defined, The Road Less Traveled [S]
11. One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them, and exceeding limits requires effort.
#12 Escape from Freedom, The Road Less Traveled [S]
12. 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, be it “fate” or “society” or the government or the corporation or our boss.
#13 The Religion of Science, The Road Less Traveled [S]
13. …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; consequently, to examine and hence understand accurately, it is necessary for human beings to subject themselves to the discipline of scientific method.
#14 The Nature of Power, The Road Less Traveled [S]
14. We are often most in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.
#15 The Work of Attention, The Road Less Traveled [S]
15. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.
#16 The Risk of Confrontation, The Road Less Traveled [S]
16. If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
#17 Introduction, Further Along The Road Less Traveled [S]
17. I hope you will abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and 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.
#18 Consciousness and Healing, Further Along The Road Less Traveled [S]
18. To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do that, if you are like most of us, you need to change your attitude toward pain in one way or another. And here is some good news. 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.
#19 The Myth of Omnipotence, Mythology and Human Nature, Further Along The Road Less Traveled [S]
19. 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.
#20 Consciousness and the Problem of Pain, Further Along The Road Less Traveled [S]
20. All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I never was going to grow up—that growing is an ever ongoing process.