Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 9

301. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

303. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

310. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

312. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

314. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

320. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

322. “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

323. “Order is the Shire of Tolkien’s hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable, even by the naive. Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

324. “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

325. “Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

326. “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

327. “With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacle sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living, despite its fragility and suffering.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

333. “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

334. “Perhaps it’s not reasonable to ask God to break the rules of physics every time we fall by the wayside or make a serious error. Perhaps, in such times, you can’t put the cart before the horse and simply wish for your problem to be solved in some magical manner. Perhaps you could ask, instead, what you might have to do right now to increase your resolve, buttress your character, and find the strength to go on. Perhaps you could instead ask to see the truth.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

336. “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

337. “If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It’s an embodied sensation, not a thought.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

341. “To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner, rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

343. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

345. “At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

349. “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

350. “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