Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment. Proper Being is process, not a state; a journey, not a destination.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover – and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

212. “We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

213. “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

214. “Limit the rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

215. “But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

216. “Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

217. “What will you write with your pen of light?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

218. “The fact of life’s tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

219. “Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

220. “Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

221. “Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future? Because the possibility of a monster lurks underneath all disagreements and errors.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

222. “What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, “You must rely on faith in what you already know.” But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

223. “Life without law remains chaotic, effectively intolerable. Life that is pure law becomes sterile, equally unbearable. The domination of chaos or sterility equally breeds murderous resentment and hatred.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

224. “The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group – there is absolutely nothing that’s more racist than that.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

225. “If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you’re constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

226. “If you don’t believe in brick walls, you will still be injured when you run headlong into one.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

227. “Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

228. “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 on the border between order and chaos.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

229. “Now, 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 B. Peterson

230. “Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

231. “We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

232. “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. Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that they have become is now real. Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration. And then comes the flood.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

233. “Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

234. “An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

235. “An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

236. “Hating life, despising life – even for the genuine pain that life inflicts – merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil. People who come to that kind of thinking are one step from total mayhem.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

237. “There is another, closely allied form of conversation, where neither speaker is listening in the least to the other. Instead, each is using the time occupied by the current speaker to conjure up what he or she will say next, which will often be something off-topic, because the person anxiously waiting to speak has not been listening.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

238. “What shall I do with a lying man? Let him speak so he may reveal himself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

239. “If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

240. “What do we see when we don’t know what we’re looking at?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

241. “Sometimes, it will ignore me completely, because it’s a cat.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

242. “Adopt as your ambition the creation of a world in which those who work against you see the light and wake up and succeed, so that the better at which you are aiming can encompass them, too.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

243. “When the medication causes the disease, a positive feedback loop has been established.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

244. “But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future – and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

245. “When you are fighting against something than there’s something else you are not doing.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

246. “I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

247. “The most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

248. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, do not apologize.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

249. “You’re not everything you could be, and you know it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

250. “If you take the low road than that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger.”

— Jordan B. Peterson