The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“Always place your becoming above your current being.” (12 Rules for Life Quotes)
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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 meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot uncluttered themselves.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown— and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable. You play Abel to their Cain.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“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.”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”
Jordan Peterson
12 Rules for Life
