Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.

We are so ruled by what people tell us we must be that we have forgotten who we are.

I believe so many people live what I call that false identity they are living according to other people's expectations, associations, their experiences, the labels in life. And they buy into that.

I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately. All I have to do is think of me and I have peace of mind. I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I've got to do or who I'm supposed to be. I don't want to be anything other than me.

Never follow anybody else's idea - that is very dangerous because you will become imitative. Always follow your own nature, self-nature; only then will you attain to freedom. It is better to die following one's nature than to live following somebody's else's nature, because that will be a pseudo life. To die following one's nature is beautiful, because that death too will be authentic.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

You don't want to spend your life explaining yourself.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

I have a fear of labels. If someone labels me, I have to respond - do I acknowledge it, reject it, deny it, live up to it, and defy it? Labels can affect your ability to be yourself. If you're not careful, like I wasn't when I was young, that can take a toll on you. You find yourself conforming to everyone else's ideas of who you are.

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

A lot of people have their own idea of how you need to conduct yourself. But I think it's important to be spontaneous and honest, because what's frightening in the process of being correct is that you might lose yourself.

People will always try to change you. They will always want you to be who they want you to be. That's fine because I'll always be exactly who I want to be.

For a long time, I consciously tried to be a good person for others. Not anymore. Caring about other people keeps me in line, but I've decided to just be myself.

If you live your life by what others say, it stops being your life.

Where there is no inner freedom, there is no life.

They tell me what to wear, how to look, what I should say, how I should be. Until recently I had given into that pressure, I lost sight of who I was. I listened to opinions of people and I tried to change who I am because I thought others would accept me for it. And I realized I don't know how to be anything but myself.

The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.

When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.

My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

To be himself, one neeeds to be free from the pressure of evaluative praise

Anybody who told you to be yourself simply couldn't have given you worse advice.