Top highlights from 12 Rules for Life
When you have something to say, silence is a lie.
Show this quote
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
Show this quote
You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply dont know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.
Show this quote
And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
Show this quote
It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.
Show this quote
No tree can grow to Heaven, adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, unless its roots reach down to Hell.
Show this quote
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.
Show this quote
Intolerance of others views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.
Show this quote
Dont underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.
Show this quote
So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to themat least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
Show this quote
Perhaps you are overvaluing what you dont have and undervaluing what you do.
Show this quote
RULE 4 COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
Show this quote
You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).
Show this quote
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
Show this quote
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Show this quote
In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
Show this quote
We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Beingand fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward.
Show this quote
Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worthor, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their livesthey choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people dont believe that they deserve any betterso they dont go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they dont want the trouble of better. Freud called this a repetition compulsion. He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the pastsometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. Its partly fate. Its partly inability. Its partly unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
Show this quote
The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.
Show this quote
Nietzsche said that a mans worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate
Show this quote
The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.
Show this quote
Always place your becoming above your current being.
Show this quote
Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.
Show this quote
Order is not enough. You cant just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You cant long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
Show this quote
So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
Show this quote
People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.
Show this quote
Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.
Show this quote
It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the worlda handymans dream, if ever there was oneis to fix yourself,
Show this quote
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, dont lie.
Show this quote
We require routine and tradition. Thats order. Order can become excessive, and thats not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
Show this quote
What you aim at determines what you see.
Show this quote
if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequencesand infer the motivation.
Show this quote
Dont ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.
Show this quote
If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.
Show this quote
You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already haveand certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.
Show this quote
Sometimes it seems the only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer.
Show this quote
Worthlessness is the default condition.
Show this quote
And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
Show this quote
If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.
Show this quote
Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn. That is the voice of authenticity. Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else. That is the voice of inauthenticity.
Show this quote
We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. Its asking a lot. Its asking for everything.
Show this quote
Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.
Show this quote
when once-nave people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
Show this quote
Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Womens proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, Well, bucko, youre good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
Show this quote
If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. Thats the purpose of memory. Its not to remember the past. Its to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.
Show this quote
You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you dont end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. It would be good to make the world a better place.
Show this quote
Its appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
Show this quote
Mark Twain once said, Its not what we dont know that gets us in trouble. Its what we know for sure that just aint so.
Show this quote
It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.
Show this quote
Consult your resentment. Its a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. Its part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afootin which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up. Why? Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Of course, its easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, thats deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lieand tyranny feeds on lies. When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.
Show this quote
Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?
Show this quote
It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your fathers funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. Theres a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.
Show this quote
you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you dont have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).
Show this quote
Scccccratccch the most clever postmodern-relativist professors Mercedes with a key, and you will see how fast the mask of relativism (with its pretense that there can be neither right nor wrong) and the cloak of radical tolerance come off.
Show this quote
When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. Thats the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? Thats for other boys, other mennot for their dear sons.
Show this quote
Theres some real utility in gratitude. Its also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.
Show this quote
There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies
Show this quote
When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe thats the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe thats the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.
Show this quote
To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and youre so engrossed in what youre doing you dont noticeit is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.
Show this quote
you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.
Show this quote
