1. Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth … Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
2. One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
3. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present … Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.
4. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.
5. We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
6. Ultimately love is everything.
7. How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others… But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
8. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
9. Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.
10. The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.
11. 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.
Excerpt from Wikipedia: Morgan Scott Peck (23 May 1936 – 25 September 2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author, best known for his first book, The Road Less Traveled , published in 1978.
1. Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
2. The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
3. 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.
4. Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.
5. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
6. Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.
7. Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another…The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.
8. 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.
9. The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.
14. Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.
15. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
16. To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
17. One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them.
18. Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.
19. Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.
20. It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
21. There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.