Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

256. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

258. “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

259. “Finished beats perfect.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

261. “The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused and deprived.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

262. “The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

264. “But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic – and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings. A dog, a harmless, innocent, unselfconscious dog, is clearly more deserving.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

265. “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

266. “I’m not a fan of Positive Psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

267. “Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

268. “That’s poetic in its malevolence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

269. “Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone – quite the reverse. We were out to improve things – but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the obvious flaw, the danger – but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

270. “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

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. “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

273. “That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain – indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

274. “Who cares if you are prime minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

275. “Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

276. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

278. “But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t come across as a pedant.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

282. “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

283. “When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking – but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

288. “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

289. “Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

291. “Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

293. “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

294. “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

295. “The fact that a symphony ends does not mean it was not worth listening to.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

296. “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

297. “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

298. “The queen of the underworld, the goddess of chaos, is also the force that eternally renews.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

299. “The present can change the past, and the future can change the present.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

300. “Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.”

— Jordan B. Peterson