Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse, mental or physical. This is damage by omission, rather than commission, but it is no less severe and long-lasting.

You need to consider the future and think, "What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?

Almost all ideas are wrong. It doesn't matter if they are your ideas or someone else's ideas. Your job is to assume that they are probably wrong, and then to assault them with every thing you have in your arsenal, and see if they can survive.

Sometimes all that learning, impossible without the failure, leads you to see that aiming your ambition in a different direction would be better (not because it is easier; not because you have given up; not because you are avoiding—but because you have learned through the vicissitudes of your experience that what you seek is not to be found where you were looking, or is simply not attainable in the manner by which you chose to pursue it).

It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.

When you are visited by chaos and swallowed up; when nature curses you or someone you love with illness; or when tyranny rends asunder something of value that you have built, it is salutary to know the rest of the story. All of that misfortune is only the bitter half of the tale of existence, without taking note of the heroic element of redemption or the nobility of the human spirit requiring a certain responsibility to shoulder.

Nadie que de verdad se encuentre del lado de la humanidad podría ponerse del lado de algo así. Nadie que pretenda prosperar podría permitirse quedar poseído por algo así. Y si piensas que los hombres duros son peligrosos, espera a ver de lo que son capaces los débiles.

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.

You are blind, because of what you desire. Perhaps what you really need is right in front of your eyes, but you cannot see it because of what you are currently aiming for.

Ver es algo muy difícil, así que tienes que elegir qué ver y obviar lo demás.

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures.

To act to justify the suffering of your parents is to remember all the sacrifices that all the others who lived before you (not least your parents) have made for you in all the course of the terrible past, to be grateful for all the progress that has been thereby made, and then to act in accordance with that remembrance and gratitude. People sacrificed immensely to bring about what we have now. In many cases, they literally died for it—and we should act with some respect for that fact.

When it's not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.

It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended "positive illusions" as the only reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that only delusion can save you.

Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.

It is possible that you have misinterpreted the situation entirely, for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious.

When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.

He decided to be a good person, and then did the impossible things required to live that way.

It is for such reasons that trust is vital: but trust of the mature and tragic sort. A naive person trusts because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy. But any person who has truly lived has been—or has—betrayed.

the Ideal shames us all. Thus we fear it, resent it--even hate it[...]What are we to do about that? Abandon all ideals of beauty, health, brilliance and strength? That's not a good solution.

Thus, it is necessary even for the most accomplished (but who wishes to accomplish still more) to retain identification with the as yet unsuccessful; to appreciate the striving toward competence; to carefully and with true humility subordinate him or herself to the current game; and to develop the knowledge, self-control, and discipline necessary to make the next move.

people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized.

Knowledge frequently results from knowing others, but the man who is awakened, has seen the uncarved block. Others might be mastered by force, but to master one's self requires the Tao. He who has many material things, may be described as rich, but he who knows he has enough, and is at one with the Tao, might have enough of material things and have self-being as well.