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.
Suspicion is only another form of cowardice. The man who suspects constantly suspects because he is afraid. Whenever you find a man with a free, frank, generous, brave nature, you will find that man without suspicion.
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.
There is a way of losing that is finding. When soul overmasters sense. When the noble and divine self overcomes the lower self. When duty and honor and love immortal things bid the mortal perish. It is only when a man supremely gives that he supremely finds
Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.
Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.
If imperialism is not banished from the country, China will perish as a nation. If China does not perish, then imperialism cannot remain.
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