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M. Scott Peck QUOTES

M. Scott Peck QUOTES

181 " Sooner or later, if they are to be healed, they must learn that the entirety of one’s adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

182 " The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a “love object,” is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

183 " Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

184 " And I know that I and anyone else who is not mentally defective can solve any problem if we are willing to take the time. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

185 " Parents who are unwilling to risk the suffering of changing and growing and learning from their children are choosing a path of senility—whether they know it or not—and their children and the world will leave them far behind. Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age. Sadly, most do not take this opportunity. The Risk of Confrontation The final and possibly the greatest risk of love is the risk of exercising power with humility. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

186 " Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

187 " We do not know what our pets are thinking. This lack of knowledge allows us to project onto our pets our own thoughts and feelings, and thereby to feel an emotional closeness with them which may not correspond to reality at all. Second, we find our pets satisfactory only insofar as their wills coincide with ours. This is the basis on which we generally select our pets, and if their wills begin to diverge significantly from our own, we get rid of them. We don’t keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

188 " Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

189 " the healthy self, however, must always be vigilant against the laziness of the sick self that still lurks within us. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

190 " As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

191 " Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age. Sadly, most do not take this opportunity. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

192 " This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”2 "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

193 " When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is ‘I love him’ or ‘I love her.’ But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex – unless we are homosexually oriented – even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades. To "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

194 " I have said that the attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness. Not surprisingly, most psychotherapy patients (and probably most non-patients, since neurosis is the norm rather than the exception) have a problem, whether they are young or old, in facing the reality of death squarely and clearly. What "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

195 " It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

196 " Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.1 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. 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. I know about this moaning because I have done my share. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

197 " 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

198 " A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

199 " They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously—if we seriously listen to this “God within us”—we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

200 " To nourish the spirit the body must also be nourished. "

― M. Scott Peck , The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth