Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

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.

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

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.

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

Don't cast pearls before swine, as the old saying goes. And you might think that's harsh. But training your child not to sleep, and rewarding him with the antics of a creepy puppet? That's harsh too. You pick your poison, and I'll pick mine.

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

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

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

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

You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat

Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being,

I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding.

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not "what you want." It is also not "what would make you happy.

group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.

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.

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.

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.

And why does it so often seem to be the very people standing so visibly against prejudice who so often appear to feel obligated to denounce humanity itself?

MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU

Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.

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.

ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don't, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures. If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and

Ressentiment8—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system.