Jordan Peterson quotes - page 3

Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures. A religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well the religious idea of society has a patriarchal notion built into it. That would be the dying king. The once great dying king. In a religious story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world - there's a positive element and a negative element. Then there's the social world - there's the wise king and the tyrannical king. Then there's the individual world - that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level. And it stops it from being an over simplification. (Jordan Peterson)
You meet the unknown with fantasy. That's what dreams do. View quote
Jordan Peterson
You've been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do. There are reasons the ritual came about, but the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten. View quote
Jordan Peterson
You can live your life two ways: You can use your language to manipulate. You can use it as a tool to get what you want. But the problem with that is that it assumes you know what you want, and that you're right. And that's a problem, because there's lots of things you don't know, and if you get what you want you may find that (A.) You didn't really want it, and (B.) that you're not the person that started the journey towards that. That happens a lot to people, especially when they use their language in a manipulative way. View quote
Jordan Peterson
This is why you're wasting your life away. View quote
Jordan Peterson
...to be redeemed to aim at the highest value, to sacrifice what's no longer uses, existence on a deep state of meaning that. View quote
Jordan Peterson
If you want to find out whether the person is there or the ideology is there, you listen to see if you're hearing anything that someone else with the same ideological mindset couldn't have told you. View quote
Jordan Peterson
You should watch when you talk to young men about responsibility. They're so thrilled about it. It just blows me away. Really?! That's what the counter-culture is? Grow up and do something useful. "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea. No one ever mentioned that before." View quote
Jordan Peterson
Human beings have this peculiar capacity that no other creatures have: I know how I can be hurt, because I am aware of my own limitations–painfully aware-and now, because I know how I can be hurt, I know how you can be hurt, and I can take advantage of that. And that's how evil enters the world. View quote
Jordan Peterson
Jung thought that Christianity had promised the cessation of suffering for 1,000 years, yet suffering went on unabated. At the same time, Christianity had put a lot of emphasis on spiritual development at the expense of material development. View quote
Jordan Peterson
Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are? (Jordan Peterson)
Look at you people in here – what the hell is wrong with you? Nothing. So you could probably have what you want, if you could figure out what the hell it was and you diligently pursued it. View quote
Jordan Peterson
What's better: to not be afraid or to know that you can handle being afraid? View quote
Jordan Peterson
The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with. View quote
Jordan Peterson
I'm not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. View quote
Jordan Peterson
The woman offers the man fruit. Maybe that's how our female ancestors enticed males to join them in caring for offspring. 'I'll offer you food, and in response we're going to make a team. That's the deal.' And that's the human deal. That's why we're more or less monogamous and why we more or less pair-bond, and why something approximating marriage is a human universal. You can find exceptions, but who cares? Look at the vast pattern. The price we pay for having very large brains is that we're very dependent, and it takes a long time for us to get programmed, and because of that we need relatively stable family bonding, and that's basically what we've evolved. You don't get that without making males self conscious. Why not impregnate and run. It's not 'why do men abandon their children?' that's the mystery. It's 'why do any men ever stick with them? View quote
Jordan Peterson
Part of the Act of Faith is to affirm: There's no better way to bring a better Being into Being than to speak the Truth. View quote
Jordan Peterson
Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constitutes evil. There's a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior, and Dante thought it was betrayal. And I think that's right, because I believe the fundamental human resource is trust. Trust is an unbelievably powerful economic force. View quote
Jordan Peterson
When you think that the ground of consciousness is the most complex thing we know of, then it's not so unsophisticated to assume that the most complex thing that there might be is like that. Or at least that's as good as we can do with our imaginations. I don't think that's unsophisticated. View quote
Jordan Peterson
"He who has a why, can bear any how." (quoting Victor Frankl) View quote
Jordan Peterson
That's a way that you can tell if you got an argument right: it's communicable, understandable, and memorable. (Jordan Peterson)
Something that's everything lacks limitation... There are advantages to not being able to do things. If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, then there's nothing. There's no story. It's like Superman being able to bounces hydrogen bombs off of him. The whole series died because he didn't have any flaws. There's no story without limitation. View quote
Jordan Peterson
Weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail! View quote
Jordan Peterson
The motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life, and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment-filled rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end. View quote
Jordan Peterson
There are some games you don't get to play unless you are all in. View quote
Jordan Peterson