Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Profoundly inspirational Jordan Peterson quotes on success, love, motivation, relationships, and responsibility will broaden your perspective.
Famous Jordan Peterson Quotes
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. – Jordan Peterson
Truth is the handmaiden of love. – Jordan Peterson
The truth is something that burns, it burns off deadwood and people don’t like having their deadwood burnt off often because they’re deadwood. – Jordan Peterson
If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t need to worry about the future. – Jordan Peterson
Anything you let win the internal argument grows. And anything you let be defeated shrinks… So that’s another thing really to remember: Don’t practice what you do not want to become. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
You might be winning but you’re not growing and growing might be the most important form of winning. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
Can you imagine yourself in years if, instead of avoiding the things you know you should do, you actually did them every single day? That’s powerful. – Jordan Peterson
Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. – Jordan Peterson
The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable. – Jordan Peterson
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. – Jordan Peterson
The successful among us delay gratification and bargain with the future. – Jordan Peterson
Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient. – Jordan Peterson
Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods. – Jordan Peterson
The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
When you have something to say, silence is a lie. – Jordan Peterson
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
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. – Jordan Peterson
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. – Jordan Peterson
Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. – Jordan Peterson
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
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
If you are not willing to be a fool, you can’t become a master. – Jordan Peterson
You have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don’t then you don’t take care of yourself and you become vengeful and cruel and you take it out on people around you and you are not a positive force. None of that is good…you suffer more and so does everyone else around you. – Jordan Peterson
Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. – Jordan Peterson
Dialogue is the pathway to truth. – Jordan Peterson
The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. – Jordan Peterson
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. – Jordan Peterson
Make friends with people who want the best for you. – Jordan Peterson
Creative exploration is impossible, without humble acknowledgement of the unknown. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today. – Jordan Peterson
Whatever you’re doing or not doing has a cost and it’s really easy to forget about the cost of what you’re not doing. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
It’s better to do something badly than to not do it at all. – Jordan Peterson
People do not care whether or not they succeed; they care about whether or not they fail. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
Life is suffering, and suffering can make you resentful, murderous, and then genocidal, if you take it far enough. So, you need an antidote to suffering. And maybe you think that you can build walls of luxury around yourself, and that that will protect you from the suffering. Good luck with that. – Jordan Peterson
Often people won’t specify what their goals are because they don’t like to specify conditions for failure. So, if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that’s just a matter of not doing as well – then you don’t know when you fail. – Jordan Peterson
He whose life has a why can bear almost any how. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
What path are you on? Some of you is dark and some of you is light. Get rid of the darkness and then you’re on the path of light. What will happen to you when you’re on the path of light? The best that can happen to you. It might not be easy. Easy and best aren’t the same thing. – Jordan Peterson
The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it. – Jordan Peterson
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell. – Jordan Peterson
If your life isn’t everything it could be…[stop] wasting all of the opportunities that are in front of you. – Jordan Peterson
If you dare to do the most difficult thing you can conceptualize your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else. – Jordan Peterson
If you’re going to be successful you need to be smart, conscientious, and tough. – Jordan Peterson
In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition – religion, and even nation-centered 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
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. – Jordan Peterson
If you make your criteria for success razor sharp, then you know every time you screw up. But that’s great because then you could fix it! – Jordan Peterson
Stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing. – Jordan Peterson
Power is competence. – Jordan Peterson
If you don’t say what you think then you kill your unborn self. When you have something to say, silence is a lie. – Jordan Peterson
Face the demands of life voluntarily. Respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
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
Be grateful in spite of your suffering. – Jordan Peterson
You can do an awful lot by writing down what happened to you and thinking it through. – Jordan Peterson
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. – Jordan Peterson
To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small. – Jordan Peterson
Specify your damn goals because how are you going to hit something if you don’t know what it is? – Jordan Peterson
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. – Jordan Peterson
You’re not everything you could be, and you know it. – Jordan Peterson
You don’t get to choose not to pay a price, you only get to choose which price you pay. – Jordan Peterson
If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world? – Jordan Peterson
