Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
" "Everyone woke up and said, or thought, something like, "How is it that we came to believe any of this?" It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time, and that’s what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.
Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2017), Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021) and We Who Wrestle With God (2024)
Biography information from Wikiquote
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
The lion lying down with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnel house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end.
This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.
Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens? — and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil). It's the product of processes that remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It's a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner.