451 Quotes by Jordan B. Peterson

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.

Always place your becoming above your current being.

What you should do when you’re writing a book is you should have a question and it should be a real question. It should be one you don’t know the answer to and then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking.

It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.

Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.

We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.

Hating life, despising life – even for the genuine pain that life inflicts – merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil. People who come to that kind of thinking are one step from total mayhem.

When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.

True thinking is rare – just like true listening.