“I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.”
“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“God creates each soul differently, so that when all the mud is finally cleared away, His light will shine through it in a beautiful, colorful, totally new pattern.”
“When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word...."glory."”
“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.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community-making and peace
“The key to community is the acceptance, in fact the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. It is also the key to world peace”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Everything that happens in life is there to aid our spiritual growth.”
Source: Further Along The Road Less Travelled
“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“When we love something it is of value to us, and when something is of value to us we spend time with it, time enjoying it and time taking care of it.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.”
Source: Further Along The Road Less Travelled
“If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“The feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when you consider yourself valuable you will take care of yourself- including things like using your time well. In this way, self-discipline is self-caring.”
“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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible. It no more has horns, hooves and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless.”
“Often the most loving thing we can do when a friend is in pain is to share the pain-to be there even when we have nothing to offer except our presence and even when being there is painful to ourselves.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need to ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out?”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly.”
“The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.”
“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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. ... They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of self-awareness. ... [E]vil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme.”
“The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“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."”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.”
Source: The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“We skim over the surface thoughtlessly. But we must acknowledge that thinking well is a time-consuming process. We can't expect instant results. We have to slow down a bit, and take the time to contemplate, meditate, and even pray. It is the only route to a more meaningful and efficient existence.”
Source: The Road Less Travelled And Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety
“Children will, in my dream, be taught that laziness and narcissism are at the very root of human evil, and why this is so. . . . They will come to know that the natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgment to the leader, and that this tendency should be resisted. And they will finally see it as each individual's responsibility to continually examine himself or herself for laziness and narcissism and then to purify themselves accordingly.”
Source: The People Of The Lie
“The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.”
Source: The People Of The Lie
“I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar.”
Source: People of the Lie
“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.”
Source: People of the Lie
“Listening 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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Love always requires courage and involves risk.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“As I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.”
Source: Wisdom from the Road Less Traveled
“We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength.”
“The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“In and through community lies the salvation of the world.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach.”
Source: The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
