Top Quotes: “The Four Agreements” — Don Miguel Ruiz

“Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout southern Mexico as ‘women and men of knowledge.’ Anthropologists have spoken of the Toltec as a nation or race, but, in fact, the Toltec were scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones. They came together as masters and students and Teotihuacan, the ancient city of pyramids outside Mexico City known as the place where ‘Man Becomes God.’

Over the millennia, they were forced to conceal the ancestral wisdom and maintain its existence in obscurity. European conquest, coupled with rampant misuse of personal power by a few of the apprentices, made it necessary to shield the knowledge from those who were not prepared to use it wisely or who might intentionally misuse it for personal gain.”

“The limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.”

“It is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way that I can take this personally. Not because I don’t believe in you or don’t trust you, but because I know that you see the world with different eyes, with your eyes. You create an entire picture or movie in your mind, and in that picture you are the director, you are the producer, you are the main actor. Everyone else is a secondary actor. It’s your movie.

The way you see that movie is according to the agreements you have made with life. Your point of view is something personal to you. It’s no one’s truth but yours. Then, if you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear. If you’re not afraid, there’s no way you’ll get mad at me. If you’re not afraid, there’s no way you’ll hate me. If you’re not afraid, there’s no way you’ll be jealous or sad. If you live without fear, if you love, there’s no place for any of those emotions.”

Agreement #1: Be impeccable with your word

“Take responsibility for one’s actions and remain without judgment against oneself and others. Speak with integrity and carefully choose words before saying them aloud.”

Agreement #2: Don’t take anything personally

“As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won’t need to place your trust in what others do or say. You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices.”

Agreement #3: Don’t Make Assumptions

“We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking — we take it personally — then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.”

“It’s very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It’s not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions.

If others tell us something, we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don’t understand, we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.

These assumptions are made so fast and unconsciously most of the time because we have agreements to communicate this way. We have agreed that it’s not safe to ask questions.”

Agreement #4: Always Do Your Best

“The fourth agreement, which allows the other three to become deeply ingrained habits, is about about the action of the first three.

Under any circumstance, always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good.”

Conclusion

“The next step is to develop awareness of all the self-limiting, fear-based beliefs that make you unhappy. You take an inventory of all that you believe, all your agreements, and through this process you begin the transformation. You achieve the Mastery of Transformation by changing the fear-based agreements that make you suffer, and reprogramming your own mind, in your own way — such as adopting alternative beliefs like the Four Agreements.”

“You will know you have forgiven someone when you see them and you no longer have an emotional reaction. You will hear the name of the person and you will have no emotional reaction.”

“The problem with most people is that they lose control of their emotions. It’s the emotions that control the behavior of the human, not the human who controls the emotions. When we lose control we say things that we don’t want to say, and do things that we don’t want to do.”

“It’s when we lose control that we repress the emotions, not when we are in control. The big difference between a warrior and a victim is that the victim represses, and the warrior refrains. Victims repress because they’re afraid to show the emotions, afraid to say what they want to say. To refrain is not the same thing as repression. To refrain is to hold the emotions and to express them in the right moment, not before, not later. This is why warriors are impeccable. They have complete control over their own emotions and therefore over their own behavior.”

“Imagine living your life without judging others. You easily forgive others and let go of any judgments that you have. You don’t have the need to be right, and you don’t need to make anyone else wrong. You respect yourself and everyone else, and they respect you in return.”