“Have you ever seen a rose that is not perfect? What more do you want? Every rose in its uniqueness is perfect. Dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun… can’t you see the tremendous beauty, the absolute joy? A small ordinary rose radiates the hidden splendor of existence.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell. Modern man is living in a dark cell. It is narcissistic – narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind. And then there are problems, which are meaningless. There are problems that are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems that lead you nowhere; they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess. Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love – but those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered; they have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsover the pain, go into love.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“In real love there is no relationship, because there are not two persons to be related to. In real love there is only love, a flowering, a fragrance, a melting, a merging. Only in egoistic love are there two persons, the lover and the loved. And whenever there is the lover and the loved, love disappears. Whenever there is love, the lover and the beloved both disappear into love.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Love knows no boundaries. Love cannot be jealous, because love cannot possess. It is ugly, the very idea that you possess somebody because you love. You possess somebody – it means you have killed somebody and turned him into a commodity. Only things can be possessed. Love gives freedom. Love is freedom.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Love has to be of the quality that gives freedom, not new chains for you; a love that gives you wings and supports you to fly as high as possible.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Love is the only freedom from attachment. When you love everything you are attached to nothing… Man made prisoner by the love of a woman and woman made prisoner by the love of a man are equally unfit for freedom’s precious crown. But man and woman made as one by love, inseparable, indistinguishable, are verily entitled to the prize.” ~ Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad
“Relationship expert Daniel Wile says that choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. The trick is to acknowledge each other’s limitations, and build from there.” ~ Carol Dweck, Mindset
“A no-effort relationship is a doomed relationship, not a great relationship. It takes work to communicate accurately and it takes work to expose and resolve conflicting hopes and beliefs. It doesn’t mean there is no ‘they lived happily ever after,’ but it’s more like ‘they worked happily ever after.'”
Carol Dweck, Mindset
15 Scott Peck Quotes From The Road Less Traveled on Life, Love, and Solving Problems
Excerpt: These quotes from The Road Less Traveled are worth the read. Scott Peck’s book is a deeply insightful, straightforward, no-bull kind of book.
Read More »15 Scott Peck Quotes From The Road Less Traveled on Life, Love, and Solving Problems
The Road Less Traveled [Book]
Book Overview: Written in a voice that is timeless in its message of understanding, The Road Less Traveled continues to help us explore the very nature of loving relationships and leads us toward a new serenity and fullness of life. It helps us learn how to distinguish dependency from love; how to become a more sensitive parent; and ultimately how to become one’s own true self. Recognizing that, as in the famous opening line of his book, “Life is difficult” and that the journey to spiritual growth is a long one, Dr. Peck never bullies his readers, but rather guides them gently through the hard and often painful process of change toward a higher level of self-understanding.
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Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“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.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“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.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other’s best critics. The same holds true for friendship. There is a traditional concept that friendship should be a conflict-free relationship, a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ arrangement, relying solely on a mutual exchange of favors and compliments as prescribed by good manners. Such relationships are superficial and intimacy-avoiding and do not deserve the name of friendship which is so commonly applied to them. Mutual loving confrontation is a significant part of all successful and meaningful human relationships. Without it the relationship is either unsuccessful or shallow.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“As long as one marries, enters a career or has children to satisfy one’s parents or the expectations of anyone else, including society as a whole, the commitment by its very nature will be a shallow one. As long as one loves one’s children primarily because one is expected to behave in a loving manner toward them, then the parent will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of the children and unable to express love in the more subtle, yet often most important ways. The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“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.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“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.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“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.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled