Jordan Peterson > Quotes

“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself. Anything else is presumptuous.”
― Jordan Peterson

“You can neither remember nor forget what you do not understand.”
― - Jordan Peterson

“Where is what you most want to be found? Where you are least likely to look.

“In sterquiliniis invenitur”

King Arthur’s knights sit at a round table, because they are all equal. They set off to look for the holy grail – which is a symbol of salvation, container of the “nourishing” blood of Christ, keeper of redemption. Each knight leaves on his quest, individually. Each knight enters the forest, to begin his search, at the point that looks darkest to him.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Do not cast pearls before swine. If people are not listening to you, stop talking to them.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Dress like the person you want to be”
― Jordan Peterson

“You have unfairly tasked me with three very difficult questions. I was very interested in your comments about Christ’s atheism on the cross. That final moment of atheism, that’s something I have never thought about in that way. It’s a very interesting thought because what it really ….it’s an unbelievably merciful idea in some sense. That the burden of life is so unbearable and you see in the Christian passion, of course, torture, unfair judgement by society, betrayal by friends and then a low death. That’s about …as bad as it gets. Right? Which is why it is an archetypal story. It’s about as bad as it gets. And the story that you describe points out that it’s so bad that even God himself might despair about the essential quality of being. Right? Right. So that is merciful in some sense because it does say that there is something that’s built into the fabric of existence, that tests us so severely in our faith about being itself that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt. So that’s…ok now… There is a very large critical literature that suggests that if you want to develop optimal resilience, what you do is lay out a pathway towards somewhere better, someone comes in, they have a problem, you try to figure out what the problem is and then you try to figure out what might constitute a solution. So you have a map. And it’s a tentative map of how you get from where things aren’t so good to where they are better. And then you have the person go out in the world and confront those things that they are avoiding, that are stopping them from moving to that higher place. And there’s an archetypal reality to that, you’re in a fallen state, you are attempting to redeem yourself and there is a process by which that has to occur. And that process involves voluntary confrontation with what you’re afraid of, disgusted by and inclined to avoid. And that’s works. Every psychological school agrees upon that exposure therapy, psychoanalysts expose you to the tragedies of your past, and redeem you in that manner, the behaviourists expose you to the terrors of the present and redeem you in that manner, but there is a broad agreement between psychological schools that that works. My sense is that we are called upon as individuals precisely to do that in our life. We are faced by this unbearable reality, that you made reference to when you talked about the situation on the cross, life itself is fundamentally - and this is a pessimism that we might share - it’s fundamentally suffering and malevolence. But this is I think where we differ, I believe that the evidence suggests that the light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount of darkness that you are willing to forthrightly confront and that there is no necessarily upper limit to that. So I think that the good that people are capable of it’s a higher good than the evil that people are capable of. And believe me that I do not say that lightly, given that I know about the evil that people are capable of. And I believe that the central psychological message of the biblical corpus fundamentally it’s that. That’s why it culminates in some sense with the idea that it is necessary to confront the devil and to accept the unjustness of your tortured mortality. If you can do that, and that’s a challenge sufficient to challenge even God himself, you have the best chance of transcending it, and living the kind of life that would set your house in order and everyone’s house in order at the same time. And I think that’s true even in states like North Korea...”
― Jordan Peterson

“Almost all of the positive emotion that you will experience in your life will not be from attaining things but from seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value.”
― Jordan Peterson

“You have to be a Monster to stay alive.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Not let people push you around because you'll get pushed right into a corner and you'll end up as a slave and because there's tyranny, slavery, or negotiation.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Even God couldn't make a garden without a snake in it.”
― Jordan Peterson

“The universe is composed of 'order' and 'chaos' - at least from the metaphorical perspective. Oddly enough, however, it is to this 'metaphorical' universe that our nervous systems appears to have adapted.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Chaos is where we are when we don't know where we are, and what we are doing when we don't know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Suffering is a characteristic of life. You can’t take it personally.”
― Jordan Peterson

“If someone is badly hurt at some point in life - traumatized - the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely ... [they continue] to attract genuine negative attention from one or more of the fewer and generally less successful bullies still extant in the adult world.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Do not expect the beauty of love to maintain itself without all-out effort on your part.”
― Jordan Peterson

“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
― Jordan Peterson

“It's not that the Bible is true, it's that the Bible is the precondition of the manifestation of truth; which makes it way more true than true. Which makes it a whole different kind of true.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Be grateful, in spite of your suffering.”
― Jordan Peterson

“There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.”
― Jordan Peterson

“I am half Hobbes, half Rousseau.
That's why I'm not an ideologue.
- Jordan Peterson”
― Jordan Peterson

“Is it good? Well there is a tough question. Well you know, do you want to bring a child into a world such as this? Which is a fundamental question of whether or not it is good. It is an act of faith to declare that it is good because the evidence is ambivalent. Well then you think, "am I going to act as if it’s good and what would happen if I did?.”
― Jordan Peterson

“I am half Hobbes, half Rousseau.
That's why I'm not an ideologue.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Art bears the same relation to culture that the dream does to mental stability.”
― Jordan Peterson

“I noticed when you're too friendly, too kind and too social people start showing you disrespect. They take your kindness for weakness and think they can walk all over you. People start underestimating you thinking you're soft just because you're a good person. But the moment they push you too far they're gonna see a whole different side of you. A side they ain't ready for. If you're always being nice, always doing things for them, they'll keep expecting it and eventually they'll think they can take advantage of you, run over your shoes like you ain't even there. That's when you got to step up. You got to step up and show them a side they've never seen before. Just because you're nice, just because you're showing love doesn't mean you gotta tolerate their b.s. Matter of fact, that same treat people the way you want to be treated is b.s. I can give you mad respect, show you love all the time, but if I don't get that respect back, I ain't obligated to keep being nice. Some people don't deserve your kindness. Some people deserve to be checked, and some people they gotta learn the hard way what respect really means. So remember, just because you got a good heart doesn't mean you gotta take it.”
― Jordan Peterson

“The BEST men i ever met are DANGEROUS people”
― Jordan Peterson

“But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.”
― Jordan Peterson

“If you take your turn at the difficult tasks, people learn to trust you, you learn to trust yourself, and you get better at doing difficult things. All of that is good. If you leave all that undone, you will find yourself in the same position as the child whose parents insisted upon doing everything for him or her: bereft of the capacity to thrive in the face of the difficulties/challenges of life. “It does not matter if I take the easy path,” is true only if there is no personality element of the speaker that could be called out by a true adventure. And those who avoid their destiny by standing back when asked to step forward also deprive everyone else of the advantages that may have come their way had the person who took the easy way instead determined to be all they could be.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Why would people hide from God once they realize they’re naked? And I would say, well that’s pretty obvious. Once you know you’re vulnerable, do you really have enough courage to manifest any sort of semblance of a divine destiny? Well, the answer to that is pretty much clearly no. And it’s no bloody wonder. People hide when they’re self-conscious and vulnerable and what do they hide from? They hide from their deepest destiny. You know you’re vulnerable and from here on in history starts.”
― Jordan Peterson

“And suffering exists as a consequence of the consequences of our limitations. Every single person who’s alive is going to die, and every single person who’s alive is going to deal with serious physical illness and mental distress. Insufficiency is built into the human experience and there are existential consequences to that. Now I read something a long time ago, it was a Jewish commentary on the Torah. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, what does he lack? And the answer is: limitation. That’s a riddle and an answer of unparalleled brilliance as far as I’m concerned because I think it speaks deeply to something about the central nature of existence itself. And that is that without limitation there’s no being. Now, that’s a hard thing to understand, but I think you can understand it in a number of different ways. The first thing you might want to understand is that… I play this game with my students sometimes in my class. I come up to a student or pick a poor victim at random and come up to them and say, okay, we’re going to play a game. And they say, ok. And I say you move first, and they don’t know what to do. And the reason for that is because the limiting parameters of the game have not been defined. And as a consequence of that, they’re stunned by their infinite freedom into complete immobility. And what that means, in a sense is that in the absence of serious constraint, there can be no choice, no freedom, no existence. And I believe this to be fundamentally true, just as the fact that human being is vulnerable is fundamentally true.”
― Jordan Peterson