“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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.
Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.
Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”
Source: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
“The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.”
Source: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
“Evil was defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. We scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to so misuse their power, they must have the power to use in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims. The most common relationship of dominion is that of parent over child. Children are weak, defenseless, and trapped in relation to their parents. They are born in thrall to their parents ... They are simply not free or powerful enough to escape.”
“„Măsura-probabil cea mai bună- a măreției unei persoane este capacitatea de a suferi''.”
Source: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
“A life of Wisdom must be a life of contemplation and action”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“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 decisionmaking.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“The second most common misconception about love is the idea that dependency is love...Its effect is seen most dramatically in an individual who makes an attempt or gesture or threat to commit suicide or who becomes incapacitatingly depressed in response to a rejection or separation from spouse or lover......
When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love, 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.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“Life is difficult.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the 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: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“And no matter how seemingly healthy and spiritually evolved we are, there is still a part of us, however small, that does not want us to exert ourselves, that clings to the old and familiar, fearful of any change or effort, desiring comfort at any cost and absence of pain at any price, even if the penalty be ineffectiveness, stagnation or regression.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is tho accept the fact that everything that happens to is has been designed for our spiritual growth.”
“Most people want peace without the aloneness of [spiritual] power. And they want the self-confidence of adulthood without having to grow up.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“And if we take it seriously, we are going to find that this simple notion of a loving God does not make for an easy philosophy.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“Most people most of the time make decisions with little awareness of what they are doing. They take action with little understanding of their own motives and without beginning to know the ramifications of their choices.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“The tendency to avoid challenges is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial, or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature - perhaps the one that makes us most human - is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?
First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.
Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them.
Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from "the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.
Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.
Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become. If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love. Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth. Value creates value. Love begets love. Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“It is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from non-love; it is the aim of the action.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
“For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.”
“God wants us to become himself or herself or itself. We are growing toward Godhood. God is the goal of evolution.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“I can remember years ago sitting on my bed and suddenly thinking, "I am God."”
“Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.”
“I've had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.”
“The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.”
Source: People of the Lie
“Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person.”
“But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.”
“Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques--actually defensive bastions against community.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.”
“A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.”
“The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil.”
Source: Further Along The Road Less Travelled
“What does a life of total dedication to truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety
“An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes.”
“If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.”
“Integrity is never painless.”
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
“Teach us to number our days aright.”
“If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.”
“Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“If we seek to be loved - if we expect to be loved - this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.”
