Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

302. “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

303. “Those who have lied enough, in word and action, live there, in hell – now. Take a walk down any busy urban street. Keep your eyes open and pay attention. You will see people who are there, now. These are the people to whom you instinctively give a wide berth. These are the people who are immediately angered if you direct your gaze toward them, although sometimes they will instead turn away in shame.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

304. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

306. “Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

307. “It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

308. “So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

309. “The things you can see, with even a single open eye. It’s no wonder that people want to stay blind.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

310. “I think often people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless because that’s a better conclusion to come to than the reverse; because if life is meaningless, well then, who cares what you do? But if life is meaningful – if what you do matters... then everything you do matters. And that puts a terrible responsibility on the individual. And I think that people are generally unwilling to bear that.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

311. “If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

312. “It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible – even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

313. “The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

314. “And I have learned through painful experience that nothing is going so badly that it can’t be made worse.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

315. “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

316. “Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

317. “If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

318. “What is the moral of the story? Make yourself colorful, stand out, and the lions will take you down. And the lions are always there.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

319. “Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. The past can be redeemed, when reduced by precise language to its essence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

320. “Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

321. “When you are tightly boxed in or cornered – all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions – all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

323. “Opportunity lies where responsibility has been advocated.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

324. “This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on”: That’s a successful memory. That’s the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

325. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

326. “We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit. That worthiness motivates us to act, despite the fact that action is difficult and dangerous.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

327. “You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

328. “In truth, what you need – what you deserve, after all – is someone exactly as imperfect as you.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

329. “It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

330. “Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

331. “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, they are truly lost.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

332. “The world is set hard against us, of a certainty, but man’s inhumanity to man is something even worse.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

333. “The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

334. “Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

335. “Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

336. “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

337. “Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

338. “No matter how good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain good relations with someone you fight.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

339. “You should be careful, therefore, to live your life fully, and marriage and children and grandchildren, and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that, is much of what life has to offer. Miss it at your great peril.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

340. “Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists – Freud and Jung paramount among them – insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

341. “An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. Thus, we have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all. How then to envision the future, and establish our direction, without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

342. “Our primordial parents hearkened to the snake. They ate the fruit. Their eyes opened. They both awoke. You might think, as Eve did initially, that this would be a good thing. Sometimes, however, half a gift is worse than none. Adam and Eve wake up, all right, but only enough to discover some terrible things. First, they notice that they’re naked.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

343. “It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

344. “But not thinking about something you don’t want to know about doesn’t make it go away. You.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

345. “To me, cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form. Furthermore, they are a form of Being that looks at human beings and approves.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

346. “Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

347. “If you confront the suffering and malevolence, and if you do that truthfully and courageously, you are stronger, your family is stronger, and the world is a better place. The alternative is resentment, and that makes everything worse.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

348. “Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself? Now you have the answer, derived from one of the foundational texts of mankind. Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

349. “I have learned to pay attention to dreams, not least because of my training as a clinical psychologist. Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

350. “Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of the soul – a deeply human and universal human experience. It’s the journey to that place each of us goes when things fall apart, friends and family are distant, hopelessness and despair reign, and black nihilism beckons.”

— Jordan B. Peterson