“The Road Less Traveled” by Scott Peck

“The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity.”

“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.”

“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.  It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck.  And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.”

“If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.  First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.  Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask.  If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy.”

“The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again.  By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.”

“If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.  The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved.”

“We are incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves, just as we are incapable of teaching our children self-discipline unless we ourselves are self-disciplined.  It is actually impossible to forsake our own spiritual development in favor of someone else’s.  We cannot forsake self-discipline and at the same time be disciplined in our care for another.  We cannot be a source of strength unless we nurture our own strength.  I believe that not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but that ultimately they are indistinguishable.”

“Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well.  It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing.  It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting.  It is leadership.  The word ‘judicious’ means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.”

“My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited.  I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love.  True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed.  It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”

“When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending myself I am growing.  The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become.  Genuine love is self-replenishing.  The more I nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more my own spiritual growth is nurtured.  I am a totally selfish human being.  I never do something for somebody else but that I do it for myself.  And as I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.”

“Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage.  Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss.  The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.”

“Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are not in fact loving.  I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love.  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.  No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions.”

“We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.  This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race.  This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.  We cannot solve a problem by saying ‘It’s not my problem.’ We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say ‘ This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.’  But many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: ‘This problem was caused me by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me.  It is not really my personal problem.’  The extent to which people will go psychologically to avoid assuming responsibility for personal problems, while always sad, is sometimes almost ludicrous.”

“Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its 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.  When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve.  It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.  As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things that hurt, instruct.’  It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.”

“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.”