Quotes from Jordan Peterson

Life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering

You cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you're a monster.

The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been. The present is chaotic and indeterminate. The ground shifts continually around her feet, and ours. Equally, the future, not yet here, changes into something it was not supposed to be.

What we perceive, when things fall apart, is no longer the stage and settings of habitable order. It's the eternal watery tohu va bohu, formless emptiness, and the tehom, the abyss, to speak biblically—the chaos forever lurking beneath our thin surfaces of security.

Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that's being pushed in a manner in schools that's completely reprehensible. It's not education, in my estimation. It's a form of indoctrination.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

I've known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that's so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn't you take university courses throughout your entire life?

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

You may say, 'Well, dragons don't exist.' It's, like, yes they do - the category 'predator' and the category 'dragon' are the same category. It absolutely exists. It's a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth... That's the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.

Don't compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.