Jordan Peterson Quotes

ON RESPONSIBILITY & MEANING

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it
It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure
The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant
If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don’t need to worry about the future
Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell
No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens
Don’t avoid doing what you know you need to do

ON STANDING UP STRAIGHT (RULE 1)

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality
Attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence

ON SELF-CARE & SELF-WORTH

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself
You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued
Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period

ON BELIEFS & ACTIONS

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself
If you can’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences

ON GOALS & DIRECTION

What you aim at determines what you see
You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse)
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities
Wish upon a star, and then act properly, in accordance with that aim
Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being
He whose life has a why can bear almost any how (quoting Nietzsche)

ON TRUTH & LIES

When you have something to say, silence is a lie
Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell
Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie
The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood

ON LISTENING & LEARNING

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom
What is your friend: the things you know, or the things you don’t know. First of all, there’s a lot more things you don’t know. And second, the things you don’t know is the birthplace of all your new knowledge. So if you make the things you don’t know your friend, rather than the things you know, well then you’re always on a quest in a sense. You’re always looking for new information in the off chance that somebody who doesn’t agree with you will tell you something you couldn’t have figured out on your own. It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. It’s the antithesis of opinionated

ON STRENGTH & WEAKNESS

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming
I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil

ON CHARACTER & AMBITION

The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity
You’re not everything you could be, and you know it

ON GRATITUDE & PERSPECTIVE

It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons
Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural, biological

ON SUFFERING & HAPPINESS

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived
It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at—because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient

ON ORDER & CHAOS

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
We require routine and tradition

ON IDEOLOGIES & COMPLEXITY

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence
You may say, ‘Well, dragons don’t exist.’ It’s, like, yes they do—the category ‘predator’ and the category ‘dragon’ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists

ON THE PRESENT & FUTURE

The past is fixed, but the future—it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount—the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement. The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading
If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you may be fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street (reminder that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it)

ON FREE SPEECH & VALUES

Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization
If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards
You can’t have a value structure without a hierarchy. They’re the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another

ON TRANSCENDENCE

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight
No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell (quoting Carl Jung)

ON PRECISION

Be precise in your speech
A life lived thoroughly justifies its own limitations

ON OBSERVATION & ACTION

Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix
What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?

ABOUT JORDAN PETERSON: Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology who taught at Harvard and the University of Toronto. Author of the #1 bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (10+ million copies sold) and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Peterson specializes in personality psychology with particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological beliefs, combining ancient wisdom with modern psychology to help people find meaning in a chaotic world.