Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Limit the rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

202. “People who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

203. “Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years and your life will be entirely different.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

204. “Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

205. “But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

207. “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

208. “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

209. “If you can bite, you generally don’t have to.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

210. “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

211. “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

212. “Why? Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Of course, it’s easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, that’s deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lie – and tyranny feeds on lies. 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

213. “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

214. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

231. “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

232. “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

233. “To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

234. “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

235. “Marijuana isn’t bad for everyone any more than alcohol is bad for everyone. Sometimes it even appears to improve people.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

236. “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

237. “And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God – to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good – but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “The “natural” human tendency to respond to the stranger, the strange idea and the creative individual with fear and aggression can be more easily comprehended, once it is understood that these diverse phenomena share categorical identity with the “natural disaster.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

242. “Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

244. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

246. “And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us – in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

247. “Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical – even legal – equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

248. “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

249. “It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

250. “The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role... Beware of single cause interpretations – and beware the people who purvey them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson