Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them – at least the same right as others.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

102. “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

103. “Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say “Well it’s only symbolic that women are nature”, it’s like no, it’s not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that, in fact it’s the very definition of nature.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

104. “No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

105. “You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

106. “Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

107. “Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

108. “An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

109. “Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

110. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

111. “Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is and you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don’t want it to be.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

112. “To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause? That is hell. And once in hell it is very easy to curse being itself and no wonder. But it’s not justifiable and that’s why the king of the damned is a poor judge of being.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

113. “Every game has rules... The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be playing it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

114. “Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

115. “If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

116. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

117. “The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

118. “When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You play Abel to their Cain.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

119. “There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

120. “It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

121. “You’re in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

122. “When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder.9 The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same chemical and behavioural effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

123. “What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

124. “You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you aare always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

125. “You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

126. “Forest fires burn out deadwood and return trapped elements to the soil. Sometimes, however, fires are suppressed, artificially. That does not stop the deadwood from accumulating. Sooner or later, a fire will start. When it does, it will burn so hot that everything will be destroyed – even the soil in which the forest grows.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

127. “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 existing.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

128. “If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

129. “Without free speech there is no true thought.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

130. “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

131. “Consciousness is a mystery that faces the mystery of potential and transforms it into actuality. We do that with every choice we make. Our choices determine the destiny of the world. By making a choice, you alter the structure of reality.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

132. “Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be more salutary than your pity?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

133. “Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

134. “Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything – anything – to defend ourselves against that return.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

135. “I’m not hurt. I’m appalled.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

136. “When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

137. “One of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you are a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

138. “There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

139. “When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

140. “We require rules, standards, values – alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

141. “People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

142. “It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

143. “To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

144. “It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

145. “When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations – in the depths – it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

146. “Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

147. “The only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

148. “Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

149. “Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life. How could it be otherwise?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

150. “We believe that in reducing the scope and importance of our errors, we are properly humble; in truth, we are merely unwilling to bear the weight of our true responsibility.”

— Jordan B. Peterson