# Quote — Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order

> Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance. […]
>
> It is for such reasons that we need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affectation. Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others. As it is said, “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic.

- Author: [Jordan B. Peterson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson.md)
- Book: [Beyond Order](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/beyond-order.md)
- Page: 203
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Beyond_Order_(2021)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/beyond-order/buy-a-piece

## More from this book

> There is an ancient conceit in the book of Genesis (2:21–22) that Eve was taken out of Adam—created from his rib. Woman from man: this presents something of a mystery, reversing, as it does, the normative biological sequence, where males emerge from females at birth. It also gave rise to a line of mythological speculation, attempting to account for the strangeness of this creative act, predicated on the supposition that Adam, the original man produced by God, was hermaphroditic—half masculine and half feminine—and only later separated into the two sexes. This implies not only the partition of a divinely produced unity, but the incompleteness of man and woman until each is brought together with the other.

p. 273 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/beyond-order/there-is-an-ancient.md)

> If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything.

p. 184 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/beyond-order/if-you-aim.md)

> Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served.

p. 26 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jordan-b-peterson/beyond-order/ambition-is-often-and.md)