Quotes About Truth

Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson

What do you do to avoid conflict, necessary though it may be? What are you inclined to lie about, assuming that the truth might be intolerable? What do you fake?

You can decide for yourself what truth there might be in that concern after reading this book. :)

These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud's compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called "life-lies.

Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.

Jordan B. Peterson

If you listen, instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking—and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring. (You can in fact tell whether or not you are actually listening in this manner. If the conversation is boring, you probably aren't.)

Un viejo perro manso puede morder, las más intimas amistades pueden traicionar y las nuevas ideas pueden destruir antiguas convicciones que resultaban cómodas. Este tipo de cosas importan. Son reales.

Failing to look under the bed when you strongly suspect a monster is lurking there is not an advisable strategy.

In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.

And given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not.

Jordan B. Peterson

What you hear in the forest but cannot see might be a tiger. It might even be a conspiracy of tigers, each hungrier and more vicious than the other, led by a crocodile. But it might not be, too. If you turn and look, perhaps you'll see that it's just a squirrel. (I know someone who was actually chased by a squirrel.) Something is out there in the woods. You know that with certainty. But often it's only a squirrel.

The philosopher's stone remains undiscovered in the gutter; and the information hidden in the round chaos, beckoning, remains unexplored. Such omission is the voluntary refusal of expanded consciousness. After all, the pathway to the Holy Grail has its beginnings in the darkest part of the forest, and what you need remains hidden where you least want to look.

the world, as perceived, is maya—appearance or illusion. This means, in part, that people are blinded by their desires (as well as merely incapable of seeing things as they truly are). This is true, in a sense that transcends the metaphorical. Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else.

There is another fundamental problem, too, with the life-lie, particularly when it is based on avoidance. A sin of commission occurs when you do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it. The former is regarded, classically, as more serious than the latter—than avoidance. I'm not so sure.

Jordan B. Peterson

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).

Why remain vague when it makes life stagnant

Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson

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.

And, above all, don't lie. Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.