Conflict may be personal, interpersonal, or between rival groups or coalitions. It may be built into organizational structures, roles, attitudes, and stereotypes or arise over a scarcity of resources. It may be explicit or covert. Whatever the reason, and whatever the form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests.

Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man.

Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility.

Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. (p.183)

The cause of conflict is some fixed idea or one-sided idea. When everyone knows the value of pure practice, we will have little conflict in our world.

Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not.

The purpose of conflict is to create.

As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.

Very often in a conflict, we believe the problem is the other person or group. We think it is all their fault and that if they would just stop doing what they are doing or being the way they are, we would have peace and happiness. So we may be motivated by the desire to destroy the other side. We may wish they didn’t exist. But looking deeply, we know that we are not the only ones who have suffered — they have also suffered. When we take time to calm ourselves down and look deeply into the situation, we can see that we are co-responsible, that we have co-created the conflict by our way of thinking, acting, or speaking, either individually or as a group or nation.

Our successes and failures in life can be traced to how well or how badly we deal with the inevitable conflicts that confront us in society.

When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationship falls apart without our even knowing it. Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man. If Disappointment Panda were here, he’d tell you that the pain in our relationship is necessary to cement our trust in each other and produce greater intimacy.

"Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game.

These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict.

What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large.

As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.

Conflict will be a regular part of every aspect of our lives, and the more we make ourselves comfortable with conflict the better equipped we can be at handling it.

conflicts in relationships — having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse — is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.