Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

It's appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.

It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.

Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?

It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father's funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There's a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.

you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don't have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).

Scccccratccch the most clever postmodern-relativist professor's Mercedes with a key, and you will see how fast the mask of relativism (with its pretense that there can be neither right nor wrong) and the cloak of radical tolerance come off.

you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.

We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.

It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.

we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness,

I will trust you—I will extend my hand to you—despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me. So,

loving your neighbour as yourself." The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone's friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.

Here's a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam's razor, the scientist's conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don't tell yourself, "I shouldn't need to do that to motivate myself." What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave. Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.

In my kingdom," as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, "you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place." No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.

One of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you are a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity.

But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there's nothing freeing about that.

The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

It isn't precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.