The popular yet controversial Jordan Peterson wrote the excellent book called 12 Rules for Life. Chances are that you’ve seen his tough quotes about relationships and being a good man on social media. I’ve created this list to help you on the journey towards success in your chosen craft.
Best Quotes by Jordan Peterson
1. If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t need to worry about the future.
2. You’re not everything you could be, and you know it.
3. The truth is something that burns, it burns off deadwood and people don’t like having their deadwood burnt off often because they’re 95% deadwood.
4. He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.
5. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.
6. The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.
7. 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 the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.
8. If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
9. The secret to your existence is right in front of you, and it manifests itself as all those things you know you should do but you’re avoiding.
10. So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them – at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
11. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
12. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued.
13. It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.
14. Can you imagine yourself in 10 years if instead of avoiding the things you know you should do, you actually did them every single day – that’s powerful.
15. Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.
16. 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. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.
17. 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.
18. It’s better to do something badly than to not do it at all.
19. Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.
20. 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.
21. To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
22. If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you’re constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.
23. I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.
24. The successful among us delay gratification and bargain with the future.
25. If someone is making everyone around them miserable and you’d like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.
26. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
27. If you can’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.
28. We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being—and fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward.
29. The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more susceptible to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.
30. If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master.
31. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.
32. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
