When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. M. Scott Peck More Quotes by M. Scott Peck More Quotes From M. Scott Peck The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. M. Scott Peck discipline self feelings To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing. M. Scott Peck discipline eye responsibility From the age of three on, as far back as I remember, I just knew there was a God behind everything. M. Scott Peck three belief age I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers. M. Scott Peck easy-answers ifs want Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom. M. Scott Peck adversity cutting problem Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short. M. Scott Peck community answers fall We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength. M. Scott Peck nurture source Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words. M. Scott Peck too-deep framework love-is Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable. M. Scott Peck and-love self hands One extends one's limits only by exceeding them. M. Scott Peck limits writing I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same. M. Scott Peck growth spiritual mind If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need to ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out? M. Scott Peck missing wish integrity Love always requires courage and involves risk. M. Scott Peck love-always risk Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. M. Scott Peck spiritual mean believe 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. M. Scott Peck discipline and-love people Good discipline requires time. When we have no time to give our children, or no time that we are willing to give, we don't even observe them closely enough to become aware of when their need for our disciplinary assistance is expressed subtley. M. Scott Peck discipline giving children Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable. M. Scott Peck elude-us falling-in-love love-is Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. M. Scott Peck philosophical unique life How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded. M. Scott Peck strange should feels The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. M. Scott Peck contemplation action
