Jordan B. Peterson Quotes
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251. “Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

255. “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

256. “We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

258. “If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

262. “You look at the world through a story. You can’t help it.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

264. “There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary. Even the sun itself has its cycles of instability. Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

265. “Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, that are truly lost.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

266. “If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

267. “People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone – in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

268. “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

269. “There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

270. “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

271. “But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

272. “These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

273. “Everything – that’s far too much. It was specific things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed; particular actions were false and inauthentic.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

274. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

276. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

278. “A long period of unfreedom – adherence to a singular interpretive structure – is necessary for the development of a free mind.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

279. “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

280. “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

281. “Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

282. “The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you – but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

283. “We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare96 and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

284. “And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

285. “The best treatment for alcoholism is religious conversion.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

286. “El destino obliga a todos los miembros de la raza humana a comprender su aislamiento, su individualidad, su sometimiento abyecto a las duras condiciones de la existencia mortal.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

287. “A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated – or welcomed, depending on your point of view – to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

288. “Communism, in particular, was attractive not so much to oppressed workers, its hypothetical beneficiaries, but to intellectuals – to those whose arrogant pride in intellect assured them they were always right. But the promised utopia never emerged.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

289. “If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you – certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

290. “On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

291. “There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age.”

— Jordan B. Peterson