In this post, we’ll read Jordan Peterson quotes who is a Canadian clinical psychologist, professor, author, and public intellectual.
Jordan Peterson gained massive fame after he shared his views on various topics, including psychology, politics, religion, and gender issues on TV and social media. His lectures and interviews got popular and he gained millions of subscribers on YouTube.
He has authored many books and his writing explores themes such as personal responsibility, morality, mythology, and the human condition. His most famous book is “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”.
Let’s read some of the most famous Jordan Peterson quotes about life, discipline, success and more.
Jordan Peterson Quotes
1. “It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.”
2. “Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.”
3. “I will trust you—I will extend my hand to you—despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me.
4. “You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. ”
5. “Abortion is clearly wrong.”
6. “If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I’ll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.”
7. “The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.”
8. “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.”
9. “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Life
1. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.”
2. “Face the demands of life voluntarily. Respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe.”
3. “It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.”
4. “No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.”
5. “Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.”
6. “You can’t go backwards in life.”
7. “Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere.”
8. “Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Truth
1. “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 percent deadwood.”
2. “Truth is the handmaiden of love.”
3. “If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Women
1. “Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.”
2. “Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say “Well it’s only symbolic that women are nature”, it’s like no, it’s not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that, in fact it’s the very definition of nature.”
3. “The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.”
4. “There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.”
5. “If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, ‘No.’”
6. “You can say, ‘Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Men
1. “And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
2. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”
3. “It’s a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they’re almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.”
4. “Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.”
5. “One of the things I’ve told men over and over and over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women!”
6. “The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.”
7. “We’re so stupid. We’re alienating young men. We’re telling them that they’re patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture. It’s awful. It’s so destructive. It’s so unnecessary. And it’s so sad.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Suffering
1. “I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.”
2. “The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
3. “Self-love is the only antidote to the chaos of existence. And if you don’t love and care for yourself and your own needs, you will cause unnecessary suffering both for yourself and others.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Self-Love
1. “Treat yourself like you would someone you’re responsible for helping.”
2. “What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.”
3. “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.”
4. “You need to consider the future And think, ‘What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly?’”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Politics & Society
1. “There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.”
2. “Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.”
3. “I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.”
4. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.”
5. “When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.”
6. “Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.”
7. “Obviously, I’m no fan of the radical left.”
8. “Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.”
9. “The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.”
10. “Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say.”
11. “The Marxists aren’t just wrong: They’re wrong, murderous, and genocidal.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Happiness
1. “’Happiness’ is a pointless goal.”
2. “Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.”
3. “Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope.”
Jordan Peterson Short Quotes
1. “It’s better to do something badly than to not do it at all.”
2. “Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”
3. “Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.”
4. “Worthlessness is the default condition.”
5. “Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.”
6. “In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.”
7. “If you are not willing to be a fool, you can’t become a master.”
8. “When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
9. “If you don’t say what you think then you kill your unborn self.”
10. “If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don’t need to worry about the future.”
11. “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
12. “To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small.”
13. “Don’t be a slave to stupid rules.”
14. “Experience is the best teacher, and the worst experiences teach the best lessons.”
15. “It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.”
16. “That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.”
17. “It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”
18. “Power is competence.”
19. “There are some games you don’t get to play unless you are all in.”
20. “Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.”
Motivational Jordan Peterson Quotes
1. “You don’t get to choose not to pay a price, you only get to choose which price you pay.”
2. “Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.”
6. “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.”
7. “If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.”
8. “I don’t tell people, ‘You’re okay the way that you are.’ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‘You’re way less than you could be.’”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Discipline & Success
1. “The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
2. “But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.”
3. “Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.”
4. “You can do an awful lot by writing down what happened to you and thinking it through.”
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Self Development
1. “If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.”
2. “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.”
3. “When you start to realize how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.”
4. “If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards. And they will push you, and push you, and push you, until you fall off a cliff.”
5. “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.”
6. “If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.”
7. “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 honor.”
8. “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.”
These Jordan Peterson quotes reflect his thoughts on defense of free speech, personal development, individualism, traditional values as well as gender identity and political issues.
He is often a subject of controversy due to his conservative remarks regarding gender identity and political issues.
Jordan worked as a clinical psychologist, specializing in the study of personality and the psychology of religious and ideological belief systems. He also conducted research on topics such as alcoholism, aggression, and creativity.
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