Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

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.

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself.

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.

the 1960s, a decade whose excesses led to a general denigration of adulthood, an unthinking disbelief in the existence of competent power, and the inability to distinguish between the chaos of immaturity and responsible freedom.

Opportunity lies where responsibility has been advocated

Na verdade, ficamos mais negativos após uma perda de determinado tamanho do que nos sentimos bem com um ganho de tamanho idêntico. A dor é mais potente do que o prazer, e a ansiedade mais forte do que a esperança.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

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.

through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated.

But this Peterson, though erudite, didn't come across as a pedant.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself.

What shall I say to a faithless brother. The king of the damned is a poor judge of being. It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world, a handyman's dream if ever there was one, is to fix yourself (as we discussed in rule 6). Anything else is presumptuous. Anything else risks harm stemming from your ignorance and lack of skill.

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

What if there are hundreds of lobsters, all trying to make a living and raise a family, in the same crowded patch of sand and refuse? Other creatures have this problem, too. When songbirds come north in the spring, for example, they engage in ferocious territorial disputes. The songs they sing, so peaceful and beautiful to human ears, are siren calls and cries of domination. A brilliantly musical bird is a small warrior proclaiming his sovereignty.

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.

most lies are acted out, rather than told

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.

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.

It was all those counterproductive forces that the Egyptians were attempting to conceptualize in the figure of Set, the enemy of illumination, enlightenment, vision, and consciousness.

Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

If you haven't done anything wrong, do not apologize.

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

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

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.