M. Scott Peck Life Quotations

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

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.

Some Catholics have a concept I very much admire: the Sacrament of the Present Moment. It suggests that every moment of our lives is sacred, and that we should make of each moment a sacrament. Were we to do this we would think of the entire world as diffused with holiness. Wherever we might be would be a holy place for us, and we would see the holy, even sainthood, in everyone we encounter.

The giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole life styles...these are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.

We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to 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.