Proper Support

"If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life.

I Don't Envy Future Me

"As the infamous father of the Simpson clan put it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, "That's a problem for Future Homer. Man I don't envy that guy!"

- Jordan Peterson.12 Rules for Life 

Assume We Are Doing The Easy Things

About our motives and choices, assume this to be true, as with hard examination it's probably closer to the reality. 

"Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult."
- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life 

Travelled A Great Distance But Gone Nowhere

"One time, when I was about fifteen, I went with Chris and another friend, Carl, to Edmonton, a city of six hundred thousand. Carl had never been to a city. This was not uncommon. Fairview to Edmonton was an eight hundred mile round trip. I had done it many times, sometimes with my parents, sometimes without. I liked the anonymity that the city provided. I liked the new beginnings. I liked the escape from the dismal, cramped adolescent culture of my hometown. So, I convinced my two friends to make the journey. But they did not have the same experience. As soon as we arrived, Chris and Carl wanted to buy some pot. We headed for the parts of Edmonton that were exactly like the worst of Fairview. We found the same furtive street-vending marijuana providers. We spent the weekend drinking in the hotel room. Although we had traveled a long distance, we had gone nowhere at all."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life 

Long Memories

"I sloughed off a lot of my past. In a small town, everyone knows who you are. You drag your years behind you like a running dog with tin cans tied to its tail. You can't escape who you have been. Everything wasn't online then, and thank God for that, but it was stored equally indelibly in everyone's spoken and unspoken expectations and memory."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life 

Dismal Affairs

"I did not like teenage parties. I do not remember them nostalgically. They were dismal affairs. The lights were kept low. That kept self-consciousness to a minimum. The over loud music made conversation and possible. There was little to talk about in any case. There were always a couple of the town psychopaths attending. Everybody drank and smoked too much. A dreary and oppressive sense of aimlessness hungover such occasions, and nothing ever happened (unless you count the time my two quiet classmate drunkenly began to brandish his fully loaded 12 gauge shotgun. Or the time the girl I later married contemptuously insulted someone while he threatened her with a knife, or the time another friend climed a large tree, swung out on a branch, and crashed flat on his back, half dead right beside the campfire we had started at its base, follow precisely one minute later by his half-wit sidekick).

No one knew what the hell they were doing at those parties. Hoping for a cheerleader? Waiting for Godot? (Although the former would have been immediately preferable although cheerleading squads were scarce in our town), the latter was closer to the truth. It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it's not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us try to organize.......

I wanted to be elsewhere. I wasn't the only one. Everyone who eventually left the Fairview I grew up in knew they were leaving by the age of 12. I knew. My wife, who grew up with me on the street our families shared, knew."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life

Simplicity Costs Everything

'A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)"

- The Little Gidding. T. S. Eliot (1943)

Proof That Human Evil Exists

"Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. Animals can't manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi-divine capacities, most certainly can. And with this realization we have well nigh legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of original sin."

- Jordan Peterson 

No Sense Questioning A Guilty Man

" I, too, was taken to such a questioning..... He was required by law to ask what complaints I had about the conduct of the interrogation and whether coercion had been used or any violations of my legal rights had occurred. But it had been a long time since prosecutors ask such questions. And what if they had? After all, the existence of the entire Ministry building with its thousands of rooms, and of all five thousand of the ministry's other interrogation buildings, railroad cars, caves, and dugouts scattered throughout the Soviet Union, was based on violation of legal rights. And it certainly wasn't up to Lieutenant Colonel Kotov and me to reverse that whole process...."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1. 

Only Jesus Makes True Community

"I now often wonder whether it is true that America is the country without a reformation. If reformation means the God-given knowledge of the failure of all ways of building up a kingdom of God on earth, then it is probably true......

Whether the church in America is really “free,” I doubt . They are lonely Sundays over here. Only the Word makes a true community."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.  Eric Metaxas

Don't Marry With Your Eyes Or Fingers

"Olympias, on another occasion, when a young courtier had married a wife who was very handsome, but whose reputation was not very good, remarked, "This fellow has no sense, or he would not have married with his eyes." We ought neither to marry with our eyes, nor with our fingers, as some do, who reckon up on their fingers what dowry the wife will bring, not what sort of partner she will make."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher and Priest of Apollo and Guardian of the Oracle of Delphi. 

Where She Pinches Marriage

"The Roman who was taken to task by his friends for repudiating a chaste wealthy and handsome wife, showed them his shoe and said, "Although this is new and handsome, none of you know where it pinches me.""

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher.

Not What I Own......

“Dear God,

I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!

Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?

Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?

Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me.”

- Henri Nouwen 

Old Stories

".......old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental - anything that does not serve the plot - has long been forgotten in the telling. "


- Jordan Petterson. 12 Rules For Life.

A Reason To Pay Attention

"How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention."
- Jordan Peterson
12 Rules For Life

Faithful as a Bear

We have also heard of servant girls who have refused the embraces of their masters, and of private individuals who have scorned an amour with queens, when Love has had dominion in their hearts.....
For a noble woman united by Love to her lawful husband would prefer the embraces of bears and dragons to those of any other man."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

Silence Is Rarely Regrettable

"For silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech. And that is, I think, the reason why the ancients instituted the mysteries that we, learning therein to be silent, might transfer our secrecy to the gods to human affairs. And no one ever yet repented of his silence, while multitudes have repented of their speaking. And what has not been said is easy to say, while what has been once said can never be recalled."

- Greek Plilisopher Plutarch. 1st cen AD. Priest of Apollo and Guardian of the Oracle of Delphi.

Point of View

"A human being has a point of view!"

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Arrested For Nothing

"But the interrogator-butcher isn't interested in logic; he just wants to catch two or three phrases. He knows what he wants. And as for us -- we are totally unprepared for anything......
But neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives; being arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Lie Close

"After all, people say that when you lie you should always stay as close to the truth as possible."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1

Render Them Competent Rather Than Protection

"Even the most as assiduous of parents cannot fully protect their children, even if they lock them in the basement, safety away from drugs, alcohol and internet porn. In that extreme case, the too-cautious, too-caring parent merely substitutes himself or herself for the other terrible problems of life. This is the great Freudian Oedipal nightmare. It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them."
-Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote To Chaos 

Other Ways Of Seeing

"Because we are so scientific now and so determinedly materialistic it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist."

- Jordan Peterson 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos

More than Belonging And Believing But Actual Being

"Now do not let the word Mystic scare you off. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belongings systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual Traditions agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and available to everyone."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now