# Quote — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

> 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).

- Author: [Jordan B. Peterson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson.md)
- Book: [12 Rules for Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/12-rules-for-life.md)
- Page: 27
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#12_Rules_for_Life_(2017)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/12-rules-for-life/to-stand-up-straight

## More from this book

> 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.

p. 250 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/12-rules-for-life/people-organize-their.md)

> 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.

p. 242 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/12-rules-for-life/it-took-untold.md)

> Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so. Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.

p. 119 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/12-rules-for-life/was-it-really.md)