Jordan Bernt Peterson / b. 1962 / Edmonton, Alberta, Canada / Clinical Psychologist, Professor of Psychology, Lecturer, Author, Podcaster
Note: Where known, sources are cited. However, no specific sources are known for many of the following quotations, which may appear in multiple writings, lectures, interviews, podcasts, and/or tweets.
Happiness
The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal. Happiness is a pointless goal. The more you pursue it, the more you flee it.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Human Nature
If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
People who don’t think that their lives are worthwhile and meaningful are likely to be resentful, bitter, dangerous, and destructive.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
The very idea of the ‘Noble Savage’ is a racist concept. It suggests that human beings are so corrupt that only aboriginal people are essentially good. That’s nonsense.
Ideology
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Life
Order and chaos are the yin and yang of life.
The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.
The purpose of life is not happiness alone. It is something greater: meaningfulness.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
You’re not after a secure income, comfortable inaction, and endless leisure. You’re after adventure, and adventure is never without risk.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
You don’t get to choose not to pay a price, you only get to choose which price you pay.
It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Moral Education
Don’t let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
The best way to make a tyrant out of someone is to feed and encourage their victim mentality.
You should take care of, you should have some care for, you should have some respect for, the things that are outside of you that are fragile and dying.
It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them. It is far better to ensure that they are able to take care of themselves.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Public Discourse
In order to think, you have to risk being offensive.
If you don’t say what you think then you kill your unborn self.
Self-Improvement
Clean your room.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Aim at the highest good you can conceive and commit to it heart and soul.
Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always equal or more than equal to the challenge.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Self-Knowledge
You’re not as nice as you think. You’re not as smart as you think.
You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
Suffering
You need a meaning to offset the suffering of life.
Lecture, “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, Lecture 6: The Flood—Psychological Background” (2017).
The suffering that you will have to endure will have a purpose, even if it is only the learning of what you do not want. And that’s a start. That’s always a start. Then you can ask yourself, if you dare, what it is that you would like to find instead.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.
Lecture, “Personality and Its Transformations, Lecture 18: Biology and Traits—Openness, Intelligence, and Creativity (Part 1)” (2017).
Truthfulness
It’s a lot harder to tell the truth than to not, and if you do tell the truth, then you have to be a good person, because otherwise, all that’s going to happen to you is that you’re going to get walloped.
Vision
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).