Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

So rules there will be—but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another's rule?

I will make a different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better—whatever that might be—and I will start working on it now.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it.

The noble savage Rousseau described, however, was an ideal—an abstraction, archetypal and religious—and not the flesh-and-blood reality he supposed.

Reason is something alive. It lives in all of us. It's older than any of us. It's best understood as a personality, not a faculty.

Somos animales de carga y tenemos que aguantar lo que nos ponen encima para justificar nuestra miserable existencia.

Nuestros sistemas de ansiedad son sumamente prácticos y asumen que cualquier cosa de la que huyes es peligrosa.

Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.

The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia.

If you are not communicating about anything that engages other people, then the value of your communication—even the value of your very presence—risks falling to zero. It was in this manner that she began to more profoundly explore the complex hierarchy of value that made up her family and the broader society surrounding her.

Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being.

Rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. (…) Limit the rules. Then, figure out what to do when one of them gets broken.

We are not helpless. Even in the rubble of the most broken-down lives, useful weapons might still be found.

The "fit" in "fitness" is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

One person begins by telling a story about some interesting occurrence, recent or past, that involved something good, bad or surprising enough to make the listening worthwhile. The other person, now concerned with his or her potentially substandard status as less-interesting individual, immediately thinks of something better, worse, or more surprising to relate.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.

Hace unos 300 millones de años, los cerebros y los sistemas nerviosos eran comparativamente simples. No obstante, ya poseían la estructura y la neuroquímica necesarias para procesar información sobre el estatus y la sociedad.

The only time /no/ ever means /no/ in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.

PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE

Everything does not have to be given away for free. But even a little unnecessary mystery goes a long way.

You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs. To put this in modern terms, it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life.