12 Rules for Life | Quotes

On my Journey to "300 books before September 2023", I just completed the wonderful and dense book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by the amazing Jordan B. Peterson. Here are my favourite quotes from the book.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos | Book by Jordan B. Peterson

Best Quotes

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

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.

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

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. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being.

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

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

The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.

The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.

Always place your becoming above your current being. Always be ready to sacrifice what you are today for what you can be tomorrow.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.

So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.

Keep Reading! Keep Learning!