“If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can’t need social approval to go forward.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

“Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique—and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“I'm not a fan of Positive Psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

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

“Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13', where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned.
But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can't be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’.
This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me. Rather like Escher's hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true. Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“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

“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

“I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“You are not only something that is. You are something that is becoming — and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation.

Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves.

The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything is getting better and better. Supercooled euphoria. Controlled anaesthesia.

I should like to see the equivalent of Bernard Tapie in the world of business emerge in the world of concepts. Buying up failing concepts, swallowing them up, dusting them off (firing all the deadbeats who are in the way), putting them back into circulation with a dynamic virginity, sending them shooting up on the Stock Exchange and then abandoning them afterwards like dogs. Some people do this very well.
It is perhaps better to save tired concepts by maintaining them in a super cooled state like unemployed labour, or locking them away in interactive data banks kept alive on a respirator.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The universe is composed of 'order' and 'chaos' - at least from the metaphorical perspective. Oddly enough, however, it is to this 'metaphorical' universe that our nervous systems appears to have adapted.”
― Jordan Peterson

“Dress like the person you want to be”
― Jordan Peterson

“I have been searching for decades for certainty. It has not been solely a matter of thinking, in the creative sense, but of thinking and then attempting to undermine and destroy those thoughts, followed by careful consideration and conservation of those that survive. It is identification of a path forward through a swampy passage, searching for stones to stand on safely below the murky surface. However, even though I regard the inevitability of suffering and its exaggeration by malevolence as unshakable truths, I believe even more deeply that people have the ability to transcend their suffering, psychologically, and practically, and to constrain their own malevolence, as well as the evils that characterise the social and the natural worlds.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Peterson is the new Winthrop. The Puritans are on the march again, furiously cleaning their rooms because cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
― Joe Dixon, Clean Up Your Room!: The Eternal Spotless Mind of Jordan Peterson

“Jobless Jack sits in his damp basement watching YouTube videos of Jordan Peterson, while Mary goes on a Brené Brown course on ‘vulnerability as a leadership skill’. Welcome to the second machine age!”
― Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men

“The central contradiction in Peterson’s message is that he both uncritically celebrates capitalist “free markets” and sounds the alarm at the destructive toll those markets inevitably take on relationships and communities. Our message, however, must reject Peterson’s traditionalist and pseudo-libertarian worldview in favor of a vision in which everyone has the economic freedom—as in, freedom from economics—to pursue their own preferred vision of the good life. Want to have a traditional family and take your seven kids to a traditional church? Go for it. Want to live in a tri-sexual compound and practice Wiccanism? Do that. Where Peterson wants to “enforce” monogamy, socialists like me want to give everyone the freedom to make more meaningful choices in their lives by creating a world in which financial stress doesn’t make it difficult to maintain relationships, people who want to start families can, and we aren’t all too overworked, overstressed, and socially atomized to go out and meet people in the first place (or too afraid of indigency that we stay in toxic relationships).”
― Michael Brooks

“The 'natural,' pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning - which is essentially implication for action - and not with 'objective' nature.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“Na verdade, creio que é razoável afirmar que, muitas vezes, são as pessoas que tiveram uma vida muito fácil – que foram mimadas e cuja autoestima foi falsamente elevada – que assumem o papel de vítima e a atitude de ressentimento. Pelo contrário, encontramos pessoas que foram magoadas quase para lá da possibilidade de recuperação e que não são ressentidas nem alguma vez se atreverão a apresentar-se como vítimas. Não são assim tão comuns, mas também não são assim tão raras. O ressentimento não parece ser, por isso, uma consequência inevitável do sofrimento. Há outros fatores em jogo, além da inegável tragédia da vida.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Pode ser avassalador abrirmo-nos à beleza do mundo sobre a qual, em adultos, aplicámos uma demão de simplicidade. Mas, se não fizermos isso – por exemplo, se não estivermos plenamente envolvidos ao passear com um filho –, perdemos a noção da grandeza e do espanto que o mundo sem amarras produz constantemente e reduzimos as nossas vidas à necessidade básica.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Porque é que cada pequena localidade não pode ter um santuário dedicado a uma grande peça de arte, em vez de as peças estarem todas juntas de uma forma que torna impossível a quem quer que seja apreendê-las de uma única vez? Uma só obra-prima não é suficiente para uma sala, ou até para um edifício? Ter numa única sala dez grandes obras de arte, ou cem, é absurdo, uma vez que cada uma delas é um mundo em si e por si.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Uma personalidade saudável, dinâmica e, acima de tudo, verdadeira, admitirá quando cometeu um erro. Abandonará voluntariamente – ou deixará morrer – perceções, pensamentos e hábitos ultrapassados, olhando-os como impedimentos à continuação do seu crescimento e êxito. Esta alma é a que deixará velhas crenças serem consumidas, muitas vezes de forma dolorosa, para poder voltar a viver e avançar, renovada.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Uma transformação voluntária de morte e renascimento – a mudança necessária para a adaptação em face de coisas terríveis – é por isso uma solução para a rigidez, potencialmente fatal, da falsa certeza absoluta, da ordem em excesso e da rotina.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“É a interação viva entre instituições sociais e realização criativa que mantém o mundo equilibrado sobre a linha estreita entre demasiada ordem e demasiado caos. É um imbróglio terrível; um autêntico fardo existencial.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“...so I took the benzodiazepines.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“A central thesis of both Spengler and Toynbee is that the world of late civilization was resacralized – made religious again – not because critical intelligence was persecuted and repressed, or starved of resources, but because it ended up attacking and refuting itself. Rationalism ate itself. Today, postmodernism is a hyper-cynical and skeptical critical philosophy, laying waste to all truth claims, including, arguably, its own. This can never satisfy anyone, so the world moves on to something else. It rediscovers religion. It’s more fun, if nothing else. All philosophical traditions turn on themselves and kill themselves. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he might as well have said, “Philosophy is dead.” And he was arguably its leading assassin. He was Brutus plunging the dagger into Caesar. When you do that, Christ appears where Caesar once stood. It’s essential for intellectuals to make absolute truth claims. If they don’t, priests, prophets and gurus will do so, and fill the vacuum. Jordan Peterson increasingly postures as a guru proclaiming absolute truth (the Logos). But at least he’s a guru exposing the people to the great intellectual ideas of Nietzsche and Jung.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“A sane psychological religion can be constructed, and Jungian psychology is the best route to it. Jordan Peterson should be using his undoubted intellect to create a new religion for a new Age – a psychological religion, by which is meant a religion that is predicated on the work of the great psychologists. Jungian psychology will of course be at its core. The last thing we need is the rebirth of Judeo-Christianity. Rather than draw archetypes from the past, which lock us into the past, we need archetypes to lead us into the future. We need the world’s greatest psychologists working on constructing the healthiest, sanest religion there has ever been, one which changes human psychology forever and makes us the masters of our own fate.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“Um documento antigo conhecido como Codex Bezae, IX ou Códice de Beza, uma variante não canônica de parte do Novo Testamento, traz uma interpolação logo após a seção do Evangelho de Lucas apresentada anteriormente, ajudando a esclarecer esse mesmo assunto. Ele oferece uma visão mais profunda da relação complexa e paradoxal entre o respeito pelas regras e a ação moral criativa necessária e desejável, apesar de se manifestar em aparente oposição a essas regras. O documento contém um relato de Cristo se dirigindo a alguém que, assim como Ele, quebrou uma regra sagrada: “Naquele mesmo dia, observando alguém que trabalhava no shabat, [Jesus] disse-lhe: Ó Homem, se de fato sabes o que fazes, és abençoado; mas, se não sabes, és maldito e transgressor da Lei.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Deep Blue Mystic - A Haiku

Mighty ocean's grace,
True power lies in stillness,
Destruction withheld.”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“Es fácil acumular cosas. Es fácil actuar sin pensar. Es fácil tomar muchas malas decisiones. Lo difícil es llegar a tomar pocas decisiones excelentes”
― Juan I. Fernández, Libertad para Gente Inteligente: De la cognición a la acción