M. Scott Peck Quotes
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Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
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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.
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The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.
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But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.
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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.
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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.
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The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.
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Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.
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An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
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I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.
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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.
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We are most often in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.
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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.
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It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.