Quotes About Meaning

Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life.

Jordan B. Peterson

There are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

The 'natural,' pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning - which is essentially implication for action - and not with 'objective' nature.

Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Nietzsche wrote those words.

Jordan B. Peterson

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be "live in truth.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson

no se trata en absoluto de la voluntad de creer en cosas que sabes perfectamente que son falsas. Eso sería ignorancia o ceguera voluntaria. Se trata, por el contrario, de darse cuenta de que las irracionalidades trágicas de la vida tienen que compensarse con un compromiso igualmente irracional con la bondad esencial del Ser.

That is a very difficult question. It is, on the one hand, the question of value: What is of the highest importance? It is, on the other hand, the question of sovereignty: What principle should rule?

Jordan B. Peterson

Elige tu destino y expresa tu Ser. Como el gran filósofo alemán del siglo XIX Friedrich Nietzsche observó tan brillantemente: «Quien tiene un porqué para vivir encontrará casi siempre el cómo».67

But if it's uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don't reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.

Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever.

The "world" of the Sumerians was not objective reality, as we presently construe it. It was simultaneously more and less—more, in that this "primitive" world contained phenomena that we do not consider part of "reality," such as affect and meaning; less, in that the Sumerians could not describe (or conceive of) many of those things that processes of science have revealed to us. Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world.

Jordan B. Peterson

If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you're lost. Nothing will save you

noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."61

Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.

We are low-resolution ("kenotic") versions of God. We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing, either.