It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
Interpretation
Self-discipline is harder to achieve than external authority. Mastering oneself is a greater challenge than managing others.
This quote by Jordan Peterson highlights the complexity of self-control and personal governance compared to the task of managing others outwardly. It suggests that true leadership begins within, as the ability to direct one's own life and actions requires immense effort, introspection, and sacrifice, often surpassing the challenges faced when leading a group or community.
In practice
Use this quote in a self-improvement workshop to emphasize the importance of internal mastery.
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.
We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart
There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be cause by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power.
What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.
Right reason is stronger than force.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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