451 Quotes by Jordan B. Peterson

We require rules, standards, values – alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years and your life will be entirely different.

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.

Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is and you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don’t want it to be.

If you are not willing to be a fool, you can’t become a master.

There is another, closely allied form of conversation, where neither speaker is listening in the least to the other. Instead, each is using the time occupied by the current speaker to conjure up what he or she will say next, which will often be something off-topic, because the person anxiously waiting to speak has not been listening.