Jordan Peterson
Clinical psychologist and cultural commentator
Most quoted
"Order is not enough. You can't just be stable, and secure, and well-regulated. There has to be something else. Chaos is not enough. You can't just be creative, and dynamic, and exploratory, or you'll be dead, or in pieces. The proper place is the boundary between order and chaos."
— from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
"You are not your own property. You are, in part, the property of your community, and your culture, and your ancestors, and your children. And you have a responsibility to them all. And if you shirk that responsibility, you're going to pay a price. And so are they."
— from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018
"The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike, and the sacrifice of hedonic pleasure itself to the greater goal of spiritual enlightenment."
— from Maps of Meaning, 1999
All quotes by Jordan Peterson (362)
It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
The purpose of life is to confront the suffering and to transcend it.
You have to be willing to be wrong.
The most important thing you can do is to tell the truth to yourself.
You have to be willing to sacrifice the present for the future.
The world is a place of both good and evil, and you have to be prepared for both.
You have to be willing to take risks.
The only way to find out what you're capable of is to push yourself beyond your limits.
You have to be willing to fail.
The most important thing you can do is to learn how to think.
You have to be willing to change.
If you don't say what you think, then you kill your unborn self.
Clean your room.
Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is not even possible if both parties do not want what is true.
Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of being. Align yourself, in your soul, with truth and then with virtue.
You're not everything you could be, and you know it.
The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
If you fulfill your obligations every day you don't need to worry about the future.
Maps of meaning help us understand the world and navigate it successfully.
Contemporaries of Jordan Peterson
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jordan Peterson (1962).