Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past's guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That's the purpose of memory. It's not "to remember the past". It's to stop the same damn thing form happening over and over.

You have very little right to break the rules, until you have mastered them.

It's *AS IF* there is a powerful figure in the sky, who sees all, and is judging you. Giving up something you value seems to make him happy--and you want to make him happy, because all hell breaks loose if you don't. So, practice sacrificing, and sharing, until you become expert at it, and things will go well for you.

Quizá la felicidad se encuentra en el viaje de subida y no en el efímero sentimiento de satisfacción que aguarda en la próxima cumbre. Una gran parte de la felicidad está compuesta de esperanza, por muy profundo que fuera el submundo en el que dicha esperanza se f

If there is a problem to be solved, and many people involve themselves in the solution, then a hierarchy must and will arise, as those who can do, and those who cannot follow as best they can, often learning to be competent in the process. If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.

completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. Knowing this, tie a rope to a boulder

You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.

Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of individuals who are genuinely malevolent

We learned that behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist. We began to inhibit, control and organize our immediate impulses, so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves.

Two-year-olds, statistically speaking, are the most violent of people.

TELL THE TRUTH—OR, AT LEAST, DON'T LIE

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no "society" at all.

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem is balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression,

You don't get to leap from being a 17 year old naughthead who doesn't know anything and who isn't disciplined to the critic of Judeo-Christian society. Especially when you can look at your own life and think about how many things you are doing you know are wrong and you could fix that you aren't fixing.

Aceptar la verdad es un sacrificio, y si has estado rechazándola durante mucho tiempo, entonces has acumulado una deuda enorme en lo que se refiere a sacrificios.

Thinking is listening to yourself. It's difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.

We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.

Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: "to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

Una persona inauténtica sigue percibiendo las cosas y actuando de formas que su propia experiencia ha demostrado que son falsas. No habla con su propia voz.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

If you can bite, you generally don't have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.

A totalitarian never asks, "What if my current ambition is in error?" He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.