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.
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe
When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.
This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.
Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction.
Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.
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