Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

That's things falling apart, like Osiris, severed into pieces. That's the structure of the person or the state disintegrating under the influence of a malign force. That's the chaos of the underworld emerging, like a flood, to subsume familiar ground. But it's not yet Hell.

How can a person who is awake avoid outrage at the world?

Intolerance of others' views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous

There are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.

if you cannot understand why someone did ?something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.

Imajte malo poniznosti.

Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

To move forward with resolve, it is necessary to be organized—to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.

I was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world's two great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion? Were all value structures merely the clothing of power? Was everyone crazy?

We can turn everything into hell with just enough stupidity

This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western.

Living things die, after all, without attention. Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.

Es la tendencia expansiva, exploratoria del hombre, su curiosidad innata, la que constituye a la vez una gracia salvadora y un error mortal.

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this.

But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you're not only a body. You're a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

That's the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price's law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.

even the oldest and most familiar places retain an ineradicable capacity to surprise you.

The 'natural,' pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning - which is essentially implication for action - and not with 'objective' nature.

Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Nietzsche wrote those words.

At the beginning of time, according to the great Western tradition, the Word of God transformed chaos into Being through the act of speech. It is axiomatic, within that tradition, that man and woman alike are made in the image of that God. We also transform chaos into Being, through speech. We transform the manifold possibilities of the future into the actualities of past and present. To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being.

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.

Jung believed that every act of social propriety was accompanied by its evil twin, its unconscious shadow. Nietzsche investigated the role played by what he termed ressentiment in motivating what were ostensibly selfless actions -- and, often, exhibited all too publically.

same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.) Then