Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— 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. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

313. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

315. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

318. “Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth – or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives – they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better – so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

320. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing. 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. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

331. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

335. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

337. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

339. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

348. “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

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

350. “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