Jordan B. Peterson

If you don’t believe in brick walls, you will still be injured when you run headlong into one.

The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic. This is not because of rationality itself, as a process. That process can produce clarity and progress. It is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation — to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.

Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion — and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?

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.

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate

Territory matters, and there is little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and death.

but damaged machinery will continue to malfunction if its problems are neither diagnosed nor fixed.

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.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism. Sigmund Freud, for his part, analogously believed that “repression” contributed in a non-trivial manner to the development of mental illness (and the difference between repression of truth and a lie is a matter of degree, not kind). Alfred Adler knew it was lies that bred sickness. C.G. Jung knew that moral problems plagued his patients, and that such problems were caused by untruth. All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

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.

For example 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.

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).

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, no