Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
M. Scott PeckRead
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Pursuing higher consciousness may involve facing pain and suffering.
M. Scott Peck suggests that seeking higher levels of consciousness and spiritual growth requires confronting discomfort and adversity. Avoiding pain may limit personal growth and the depth of one's understanding, as true evolution often arises from experiences of suffering and challenge.
Themes
PainSufferingConsciousnessSpiritualityGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth and overcoming obstacles.
More from M. Scott Peck
All quotes βListening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.
M. Scott PeckRead
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.
M. Scott PeckRead
When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion - through the fact that for that someone (or for ourself) we take an extra step or walk an extra mile. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.
M. Scott PeckRead
An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
M. Scott PeckRead
Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation. . . . The most essential attribute of human nature is its mutability and freedom from instinct . . . it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base.
M. Scott PeckRead
Similar quotes
'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.
Mohsin HamidRead
There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
David WhyteRead
Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. It can be so, sometimes.
J. R. R. TolkienRead
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
E. M. ForsterRead
I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.
Jon ForemanRead
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
Thomas PaineRead