The road less travelled and beyond

Is an excellent book by Scott Peck. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Community has to do with communication.

The word "diabolic" comes from the Greek diaballein, which means to throw apart or to separate, to compartmentalize. It is the opposite of "symbolic" which comes from the word symballein, meaning to throw together, to unify.

Virtually all truth is paradoxical.

Consciousness is inevitably associated with pain.

Perhaps the best measure of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering.

The essence of this discipline of balancing is unlearning and "giving up" something in ourselves in order to consider new information.

Through the learning of emptiness, we experience a temporary state of consciousness in which the mind is utterly open and receptive and therefore totally alert.

There is no formula. All such decisions must be made out of the "agony of not knowing".

There is something far more important than inner peace: integrity. Integrity requires, among other things, the willingness to endure discomfort for the sake of truth.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear, or in spite of pain.

All discipline is a form of submission.

Speaking the truth - particularly when it requires some risk to do so - is an act of love.

The development of consciousness is thus, among other things, a process of the conscious mind opening itself to the unconscious in order to be congruent.

The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind.

The basic tenet of systems theory (which is actually not a theory but a fact) is that everything is a system.

Contingency theory (which, like systems theory, is not a theory but a fact) simply states that there is no one best type of organization.

Systems inherently resist change.