Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

152. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

153. “Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

154. “You have to be willing to be a fool to advance.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

155. “Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely – and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

156. “Worthlessness is the default condition.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

157. “When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we’ve been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes – often at the worst possible moment. It is then that we see what focused intent, precision of aim and careful attention protects us from.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

158. “Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

159. “Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’” I have found this technique very useful, in my private life and in my practice. I routinely summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

160. “The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

161. “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

162. “But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

163. “Alternatively, perfection might be regarded as the absence of all unnecessary things, and the pleasures of an ascetic life.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

164. “It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

165. “Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would limit their expression of pathological power. It is in this manner that the willingness of the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of society.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

166. “Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage – a drama – instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

167. “It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

168. “Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspiring retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

169. “It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

170. “Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

171. “Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

172. “What you should do when you’re writing a book is you should have a question and it should be a real question. It should be one you don’t know the answer to and then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

173. “The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

174. “Alcohol temporarily lifts the terrible burden of self-consciousness from people. Drunk people know about the future, but they don’t care about it. That’s exciting. That’s exhilarating. Drunk people can party like there’s no tomorrow. But, because there is a tomorrow – most of the time – drunk people also get in trouble.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

175. “Don’t cast pearls before swine, as the old saying goes. And you might think that’s harsh. But training your child not to sleep, and rewarding him with the antics of a creepy puppet? That’s harsh too. You pick your poison, and I’ll pick mine.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

176. “Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

177. “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 meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

178. “I have clients who are nowhere near as insane as their family is, but they’re the people who have been targeted with the mental illnesses because that’s convenient for everyone involved.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

179. “How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

180. “Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

181. “The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more susceptible to non- infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

182. “Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal growth and status.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

183. “When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

184. “We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

185. “How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

186. “The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

187. “It is because of of Freud, Jung, Nietzsche – and Orwell – that I always wonder, “What, then, do you stand against?” whenever I hear someone say, too loudly, “I stand for this!” The question seems particularly relevant if the same someone is complaining, criticizing, or trying to change someone else’s behaviour.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

188. “Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

189. “Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

190. “When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

191. “To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

192. “Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

193. “You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future to the present. You don’t talk about it. You don’t all get together and say, “Let’s take the easier path. Let’s indulge in whatever the moment might bring. And let’s agree, further, not to call each other on it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

194. “Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization – this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

195. “Thus, not only is the state supporting one-sided radicalism, it is also supporting indoctrination. We do not teach our children that the world is flat. Neither should we teach them unsupported ideologically-predicated theories about the nature of men and women – or the nature of hierarchy.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

196. “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. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

197. “Territory matters, and there is little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and death.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

198. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

199. “Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

200. “If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It’s a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.”

— Jordan B. Peterson