338 Quotes by M. Scott Peck

So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.

And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: “Find out your patients’ religions even if they say they don’t have any.

Mental Health is dedication to reality at all costs.

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.

Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger.

To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring.

The message they give to their children is: “If you don’t do exactly what I want you to do I won’t love you any more, and you can figure out for yourself what that might mean.” It means, of course, abandonment and death.

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

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.