Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.
Interpretation
Embrace life's challenges and responsibilities with awareness and acceptance.
This quote emphasizes the significance of acknowledging the serious nature of life and the responsibilities it entails. Jordan Peterson suggests that to truly live, one must confront the harsh realities, accept the weight of one's choices, and do so with a clear and open mindset, preparing oneself for both the challenges and opportunities that life presents.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage students to embrace their future.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexplicably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
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