Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

Osiris stopped paying attention to how his kingdom was being run. That was willful blindness, and there is no blaming that on mere age.

Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack? The answer? Limitation.

No tree can grow to Heaven," adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, "unless its roots reach down to Hell."134

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.

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.

The "natural" human tendency to respond to the stranger, the strange idea and the creative individual with fear and aggression can be more easily comprehended, once it is understood that these diverse phenomena share categorical identity with the "natural disaster.

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

there are catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.

it is so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies because our enemies confront us with what we don't want to see. And because of that our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them.

Order is not enough. You can't just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.

This is the great Freudian Oedipal nightmare.49 It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them. And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness.

When you are fighting against something than there's something else you are not doing.

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

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

It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. (...) People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why people take drugs? Not a mystery. It's why they don't take them all the time that's the mystery. Why do people suffer from anxiety? That's not a mystery. How is it that people can ever by calm? That's the mystery. We're breakable and mortal.

Cats, however, are their own creatures. They aren't social or hierarchical (except in passing). They are only semi-domesticated. They don't do tricks. They are friendly on their own terms. Dogs have been tamed, but cats have made a decision. They appear willing to interact with people, for some strange reasons of their own. 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.

You're in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair.

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.

What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.

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.

How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.

deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

LIFE IS SUFFERING. THAT'S CLEAR. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.

To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That's a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.