451 Quotes by Jordan B. Peterson

Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.

Don’t use language instrumentally.

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions – and there’s nothing freeing about that.

The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.

Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical – even legal – equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.

Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.

It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly.