Love Quote by M. Scott Peck

“Permanently self-enlarging” is a deliberately provocative way to rescue love from its most marketable stereotype: a warm feeling that arrives, peaks, and fades. Peck, writing as a psychologist steeped in the late-20th-century self-help boom, smuggles a moral demand into a clinical-sounding phrase. Love, in his frame, is not an emotion you “have” but a discipline that changes the size of your inner world. The word “real” does a lot of gatekeeping here; it implies most of what we call love is actually dependency, ego-gratification, or romantic intoxication.

The subtext is bracingly anti-romantic: if you’re not being stretched, you’re not loving. “Self-enlarging” is a clever reversal of the common fear that commitment shrinks the self. Peck flips it: mature attachment should expand your capacity for patience, empathy, responsibility, and truth-telling. The permanence matters too. This isn’t a weekend workshop version of growth; it’s a sustained practice that leaves you altered. In a therapeutic context, that’s also a diagnostic: relationships aren’t just mirrors reflecting your needs, they’re arenas that reveal your limitations and force you to outgrow them.

Peck’s intent dovetails with his broader argument in The Road Less Traveled: love is an act of will aimed at the spiritual and psychological growth of another, and by extension yourself. The line works because it refuses comfort. It turns love into a long-term ethical project, and it dares you to measure your relationship not by intensity, but by who you’re becoming inside it.