12 Rules For Life Quotes

“We need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affection. Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others. As it is said, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine — and beauty is divine — because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic. And we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves — and beauty can help us appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“...no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility.”
― Jordan Petersen

“I have been searching for decades for certainty. It has not been solely a matter of thinking, in the creative sense, but of thinking and then attempting to undermine and destroy those thoughts, followed by careful consideration and conservation of those that survive. It is identification of a path forward through a swampy passage, searching for stones to stand on safely below the murky surface. However, even though I regard the inevitability of suffering and its exaggeration by malevolence as unshakable truths, I believe even more deeply that people have the ability to transcend their suffering, psychologically, and practically, and to constrain their own malevolence, as well as the evils that characterise the social and the natural worlds.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t. “I will end my drunken misbehaviour,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we could most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to the very bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis.
Yet people prevail. And continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me, this is miraculous, so much so that a damnfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response.
There are so many ways that things can fall apart or fail to work altogether. And it is always wounded people who are holding it together.
They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that.
It's an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.”
― Jordan Peterson

“The insane and comprehensible postmodern insistence that all gender differences are socially constructed, for example, becomes all too understandable when its moral imperative is grasped - when its justification for force is once and for all understood: society must be altered, or bias eliminated, until all outcomes are equitable. But the bedrock of the social constructionist position is the wish for the latter, not belief in the justice of the former. Since all outcome inequalities must be eliminated (inequality being the heart of all evil), then all gender differences must be regarded as socially constructed. Otherwise, the drive for equality would be too radical, and the doctrine too blatantly propagandistic. Thus, the order of logic is reversed, so that the ideology can be camouflaged. The fact that such statements lead immediately to internal inconsistencies within the ideology is never addressed. Gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman's body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored (or rationalized away with another appalling post-modern claim: that logic itself - along with the techniques of science- is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system).”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely at the border of order and chaos.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“No tree can grow to Heaven,’ adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, ‘unless its roots reach down to Hell.’ Such a statement should give everyone who encounters it pause. There was no possibility for movement upward, in that great psychiatrist’s deeply considered opinion, without a corresponding move down. It is for this reason that enlightenment is so rare.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of being.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Aim small. You don’t want to shoulder too much to begin with, given your limited talents, tendency to deceive, burden of resentment, and ability to shirk responsibility. Thus, you set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, ‘What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable. Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“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