Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318).

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie.

I never believe I'm presenting objective reality; I also don't want to delude people into thinking that my subject is talking directly to them.

When you look in the mirror what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you?

...Every single one of us goes through life depending on and bound by our individual knowledge and awareness. And we call it reality. However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies, don't you think?

This was real. And it was me. I had lived that life, and I had died that death. I was staring at the very end of me.

We see only that which we are.

Alas! we give our own coloring to the actions of others.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

As you are, so is the world.

Reality is inside the skull.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

We see in others what we want and what we fear.

The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it.

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

Life can show up no other way than that way in which you perceive it.

The world is as you are.

The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo,' Radar says, 'I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.