Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

Con el tiempo nuestro nombre caerá en el olvido y nadie se acordará de nuestras obras. Pasará nuestra vida como rastro de nubes y como neblina se disipará, acosada por los rayos del sol y abatida por su calor.

There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.

can't see how this behaviour would have improved his popularity or status.

It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed.

I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, "If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business being there.

If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical voice within says the same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom.

An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).

If the answer is no, here's something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.

If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself.

When culture disintegrates—because it refuses to be aware of its own pathology; because the visionary hero is absent—it descends into the chaos that underlies everything

What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know.

Nicomachean Ethics.

The wise and ancient parts of you, seriously concerned with your survival, are neither easy to deceive nor to set aside.

Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis—a multitude of transformations—before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.

The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely.

Pointing is, as well, a crucial precursor to the development of language.

La gente crea su propio mundo con las herramientas que tiene a su alcance y unas herramientas defectuosas producen resultados defectuosos.

The world of possibility begins to actualize itself with such instinctual, embodied action, unconscious and uncontrollable.

It is not vision as such, and not a plan devised to achieve a vision, that is at fault under such circumstances. A vision of the future, the desirable future, is necessary. Such a vision links action taken now with important, long-term, foundational values. It lends actions in the present significance and importance. It provides a frame limiting uncertainty and anxiety.

It was impossible for me not to conclude that some of what had reduced her to her monthslong state of moral paralysis was not so much guilt about potentially contributing to the negative effects of human striving on the broader world, as it was the sense of moral superiority that concern about such things brought her (despite the exceptional psychological danger of embracing this dismal view of human possibility).

Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a mortality rate of 100%.

Necesitamos reglas, patrones y valores, tanto en soledad como en compañía.

El suceso inesperado puede ser también un conflicto conyugal, la muerte de la pareja o el divorcio u hospitalización de alguien cercano. Así pues, es un acontecimiento real lo que suele precipitar intensificación del miedo a la muerte y al juicio social.