Top 400 Jordan B. Peterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Osiris stopped paying attention to how his kingdom was being run. That was willful blindness, and there is no blaming that on mere age.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

352. “I believe that the good that people do, small though it may appear, has more to do with the good that manifests broadly in the world than people think, and I believe the same about evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

353. “Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

354. “The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

355. “Competence beats obedience.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

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

— Jordan B. Peterson

357. “Before Set’s defeat and banishment from the kingdom, he tears out one of his nephew’s eyes. But the eventually victorious Horus takes back the eye. Then he does something truly unexpected: he journeys voluntarily to the underworld and gives the eye to his father. What does this mean? First, that the encounter with malevolence and evil is of sufficient terror to damage even the vision of a god; second, that the attentive son can restore the vision of his father.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

358. “Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

359. “Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

360. “The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

361. “Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

362. “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

363. “Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

364. “If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

365. “And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced – then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

366. “We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

367. “Assuming that others think as they do, they expect – instead of ensuring – reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

368. “It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

369. “To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

370. “There is a terrible reptilian predator, metaphorically speaking, pursuing you all the time, just like the crocodile with the ticktock of time emanating from the clock he swallowed chasing the tyrannical coward Captain Hook.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

371. “On top of all that is the general complexity of life, complicating the search for clarity. Consider the question “What really happened?” say, in a failed marriage, divorce, and child-custody battle. The answer to that query is so complex that settling the disagreements frequently requires court evaluation and multi-party assessment.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

372. “Much more of our sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social community.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

373. “Because we are so scientific now – and so determinedly materialistic – it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

374. “Adam and Eve don’t seem very conscious, at the beginning, when they are first placed in Paradise, and they were certainly not self-conscious. As the story insists, the original parents were naked, but not ashamed.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

375. “It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, “if they loved me, they would know what to do.” That’s the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

376. “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

377. “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.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

378. “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

379. “Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence.212.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

380. “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

381. “Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

382. “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

383. “It is easy for optimism to be undermined and demolished, however, if it is naive, and for cynicism to arise in its place. But the act of peering into the darkness as deeply as possible reveals a light that appears unquenchable, and that is a profound surprise, as well as a great relief.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

384. “An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

385. “If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?”

— Jordan B. Peterson

386. “Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification. Such a philosophy judges Being and becoming alike, and deems them flawed. It denounces truth as insufficient and the honest man as deluded. It is a philosophy that both brings about and then justifies the endemic corruption of the world.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

387. “I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another – and that the systems weren’t just about belief.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

388. “And maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

389. “Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

394. “Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

395. “If Mother Nature wasn’t so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

396. “The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

397. “The moral of Genesis I is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

398. “Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.”

— Jordan B. Peterson

399. “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

400. “Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.”

— Jordan B. Peterson