Beyond Order Quotes

“That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“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. So,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated - or welcomed, depending on your point of view - to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“The healthy, dynamic, and above all else truthful personality will admit to error. It will voluntarily shed—let die—outdated perceptions, thoughts, and habits, as impediments to its further success and growth. This is the soul that will let its old beliefs burn away, often painfully, so that it can live again, and move forward, renewed. This is also the soul that will transmit what it has learned during that process of death and rebirth, so that others can be reborn along with it. Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance. Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacle sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living, despite its fragility and suffering. If you truly wanted, perhaps you would receive, if you asked. If you truly sought, perhaps you would find what you seek. If you knocked, truly wanting to enter, perhaps the door would open. But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Here is the problem: Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back. And that is particularly true for those daily events that everyone is prone to regard as trivial—even the plates on which you eat your lunch. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“We need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affection. Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others. As it is said, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine — and beauty is divine — because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic. And we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves — and beauty can help us appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter. When you are tightly boxed in or cornered—all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions—all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Other people keep you sane. That is partly why it is a good idea to get married. Why? Well, you are half insane, and so is your spouse (well, maybe not half—but plenty). Hopefully, however, it is not generally the same half.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“truth, virtue, and courage are not necessarily enough, but they are our best bet.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding. Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life. You are very creative when you are dreaming. That is why, when you remember a dream, you think, “Where in the world did that come from?” It is very strange and incomprehensible that something can happen in your head, and you have no idea how it got there or what it means. It is a miracle: nature’s voice manifesting itself in your psyche. And it happens every night. Like art, the dream mediates between order and chaos. So, it is half chaos. That is why it is not comprehensible. It is a vision, not a fully fledged articulated production. Those who actualize those half-born visions into artistic productions are those who begin to transform what we do not understand into what we can at least start to see. That is the role of the artist, occupying the vanguard. That is their biological niche. They are the initial civilizing agents.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“The Fatal Attraction of the False Idol Consider those who have not gone so far as to adopt the discredited ideologies of the Marxist-Leninists and the Nazis, but who still maintain faith in the commonplace isms characterizing the modern world: conservatism, socialism, feminism (and all manner of ethnic- and gender-study isms), postmodernism, and environmentalism, among others. They are all monotheists, practically speaking—or polytheistic worshippers of a very small number of gods. These gods are the axioms and foundational beliefs that must be accepted, a priori, rather than proven, before the belief system can be adopted, and when accepted and applied to the world allow the illusion to prevail that knowledge has been produced.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“The cross is the burden of life. It is a place of betrayal, torture, and death. It is therefore a fundamental symbol of mortal vulnerability. In the Christian drama, it is also the place where vulnerability is transcended, as a consequence of its acceptance. [...] By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“The physical consequences of depression, often preceded by excess secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, are essentially indistinguishable from rapid aging (weight gain, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s).”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself. Otherwise, why would you feel the loss?”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“It is difficult for any of us to see what we are blinded to by the nature of our personalities. It is for this reason that we must continually listen to people who differ from us, and who, because of that difference, have the ability to see and to react appropriately to what we cannot detect.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“we need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affectation. Art is the bedrock of culture itself.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“And, while that is happening, you get weaker. You are less than you could be because you did not change. You did not become who you could have become as a consequence of that change—and worse: you have now taught yourself, by your own example, that such turning away is acceptable, and you are therefore more likely to commit the same error in the future. And what you failed to face is now larger. This is not the kind of causal process, the kind of positive feedback loop, that you want to find yourself trapped within. So, you must confess, at least to yourself, and repent, at least within yourself, and you must change, because you were wrong. And you must humbly ask, and knock, and seek. And that is the great barrier to the enlightenment of which we are all capable in principle. This is not to claim that the courage necessary to confront the full horrors of life is easy to muster. But the alternative is worse.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day. The things which I have seen I now can see no more. . . . Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all. Oh evil day! if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning, This sweet May-morning, And the Children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:— I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! —But there’s a Tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone; The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? —William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic. And we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves—and beauty can help us appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“or enlightened is to be exceptionally awake and aware—to attain a state of being commonly associated with divinity. To wear a diamond is to become associated with the radiance of the Sun, like the king or queen whose profile is stamped on the sunlike disc of the gold coin, a near-universal standard of worth. Heat and pressure transform the base matter of common coal into the crystalline perfection and rare value of the diamond. The same can be said of a person. We know that the multiple forces operating”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“exploitative and corrupt, as they can be logically read as undeserving beneficiaries,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

“Es mejor enseñarles a tus monstruitos lo que está bien y lo que no, para que se conviertan en sofisticados ciudadanos del mundo que se abre más allá de la familia.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Orden y caos: 24 reglas para vivir (Pack): 12 reglas para vivir y Más allá del orden (No Ficción)

“What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility—and this includes the responsibilities that others disregard or neglect.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life