M. Scott Peck Quotes

You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything and know that we don't, that's the important part.

I guess it's just another one of life's little mysteries." "I'm tired of mysteries." "Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.

We live in a bewildering world.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.

The side of fairytales I don't like is that they always have happy endings, that there's just good and evil, and things are perfect. But life is a little more complicated, and that's what I try to teach my kids.

For every answer, I like to bring up a question. Maybe I'm related to Alfred Hitchcock or maybe I got to know him too well, but I think life should be that way.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

Don't express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not.

I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

As soon as you think you know Clint Eastwood, you don't know Clint Eastwood.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had 'hard-and-fast rules' we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

Tohru: Shigure is always smiling. But, I wonder if I gave him some problems with my request. Yuki: The only ones who can truly understand what Shigure is thinking is Hatori and... a few other people. Someone has said this before. It is said that he is like a "tide..." A tide that carries you away when you get too close to it. The tide touches your feet... But when you reach down to touch it, it will have already departed. It is within your reach, yet you may never catch it.

The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?