Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Whenever you are cut off at the knees by one of life's many catastrophes, whenever a dream collapses, or someone close to you is hurt in some fundamental way—especially a child or another loved one—then you can easily find yourself thinking, "Perhaps it would be better if the whole mess was just brought to a halt.

Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).

The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

He suggested that his readers conduct a short experiment when they next found themselves in a dispute: "Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: 'Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction.

Proper discipline requires effort -- indeed, is virtually synonymous with effort. It is difficult... ...to pay careful attention to children. ...to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why ...to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child's care

And how can we possibly communicate with each other intelligibly about that attempt, trade information about the most effective conceptualizations, approaches, and strategies? The answer to that, as far as I can tell, is by communicating through stories about what is and, equally, what could be. And what that implies is that if possibility is the ultimate element of reality with which we contend, then it is stories that hold the wisdom that we most need to know.

Mantenerse erguido con los hombros hacia atrás es aceptar con los ojos bien abiertos la terrible responsabilidad que supone vivir.

We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don't take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be.

We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there.

La personalidad atrofiada experimentará la vida como una carga, como una responsabilidad demasiado pesada para soportarla, y recurrirá al resentimiento y al odio como respuestas -justificables-.

And this is only the beginning of the road to total familial warfare, conducted mostly in the underworld, underneath the false façade of normality and love.

The same pattern of creative conflict pervades the Old Testament, which is in large part a series of stories about the spirit in prophetic opposition to the inevitable corruption of dogma harnessed to serve power. It is the personality who mimics that model who might be regarded as truly Western, in the deepest of psychological senses.

We make many assumptions about nature—about the environment—and these have consequences. Mark Twain once said, "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors.

Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game,

A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of

Não existe um iluminado. Existe apenas aquele que busca mais esclarecimento. O verdadeiro Ser é um processo, não um estado; uma viagem, não um destino. É a contínua transformação do que conhecemos através do encontro com o que não conhecemos, ao invés de um desesperado apego à certeza que, em todo o caso, é eternamente insuficiente.

I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. (Matthew 13:35)

This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)

More importantly, however, Horus has the will to see, along with the ability. This is courage itself: the refusal to shrink from what makes itself known, no matter how terrible it seems.

it is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spent the same way over and again adds up at an alarming rate.

Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn't even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.

The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.