If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Interpretation
Learning martial arts teaches you both power and restraint.
This quote by Jordan Peterson emphasizes that studying martial arts not only equips you with the skills to defend yourself and be dangerous, but it also instills the importance of self-control and responsibility. It highlights the paradox that with great power comes the necessity to manage that power wisely and not use it recklessly.
In practice
During a self-defense workshop, one might quote Peterson to emphasize the importance of self-control in using martial skills.
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.
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.
I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
The only thing I want to sponsor is cancer, and cancer can be beaten. Not any other product. And I hope nobody tries to use me, because I won't let them.
In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.
This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen.
Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren't shocked.
Tomorrow do thy worst, I have lived today.
The fears that assault us are mostly simple anxieties about social skills, about intimacy, about likeableness, or about performance. We need not give emotional food or charge to these fears or become attached to them. We donβt even have to shame ourselves for having these fears. Simply ask your fears, βWhat are you trying to teach me?β Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for βFalse Evidence Appearing Real.β From Everything Belongs, p. 143
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.