Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 9

51. “If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

52. “Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

53. “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. Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly, ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

54. “Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

55. “What would your life look like, if it were better?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

56. “You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

57. “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. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

58. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

59. “Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

60. “He who has a sword, and knows how to use it, but keeps it sheathed shall inherit the earth.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

61. “That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

62. “We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown – and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

63. “What if there are hundreds of lobsters, all trying to make a living and raise a family, in the same crowded patch of sand and refuse? Other creatures have this problem, too. When songbirds come north in the spring, for example, they engage in ferocious territorial disputes. The songs they sing, so peaceful and beautiful to human ears, are siren calls and cries of domination. A brilliantly musical bird is a small warrior proclaiming his sovereignty.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

64. “If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

65. “If you don’t say what you think then you kill your unborn self.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

66. “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 B. Peterson

67. “And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

68. “Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

69. “It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

70. “In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.” No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

71. “So, 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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

72. “After all, if you’re not the leading man in your own drama, you’re a bit player in someone else’s – and you might well be assigned to play a dismal, lonely and tragic part.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

73. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

74. “Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

75. “If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

76. “Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

77. “There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

78. “What shall I do when my enemy succeeds? Aim a little higher and be grateful for the lesson.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

79. “In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

80. “We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

81. “I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

82. “In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the Word of God. That word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In his human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produced order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity, Every bit of learning is a little death.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

83. “Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

84. “Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

85. “Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not – but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

86. “True thinking is rare – just like true listening.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

87. “Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

88. “Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs – not even you.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

89. “Don’t use language instrumentally.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

90. “Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” That is the voice of authenticity. “Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.” That is the voice of inauthenticity.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

91. “If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth – then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

92. “If you start with little you start with more possibility.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

93. “Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

94. “You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

95. “Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion – and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

96. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

97. “Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity. Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

98. “Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

99. “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 B. Peterson

100. “The forces of tyranny expand inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson