Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes

They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Thou shalt not take anything on faith

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

There is no faith, without a critical mind

Doubt . . . impels a search for the truth. It opens the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. Indeed, . . . faith anesthetizes the desire to seek knowledge and truth.

Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

The investigator should have a robust faith - and yet not believe.

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

You really need faith in yourself to make art and to stand up for what you believe in.

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

I was raised with the notion that it was OK to ask questions, and it was OK to say, I'm not sure. I believe, but I'm not quite so certain about the resurrection.

Doubt yourself and you doubt everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgment. And you can see forever.