Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

Your version of the truth is all that matters.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

Truth is an illusory notion.

We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.

There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

One creature's truth is another's lie. (Scroom of Strix Struma)

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.

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

Be skeptical, but not as a social position, not claiming to be so intelligent that you cannot believe what other people say. It's not about being right and making everybody else wrong. No, you are skeptical because you know without a doubt that everybody lives in their own story, and in their story they have their own truth. But it's only truth in their mind, just as your truth is only truth in your mind, and nobody else's.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.