Below you will find eight top quotes I’ve chosen from one of my favorite books ‘The Four Agreements’, by Don Miguel Ruiz
The four agreements:
- Be impeccable with your word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using your word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
- Don’t take anything personally: Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
- Don’t make assumptions: Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
- Always do your best: Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
8 Quotes From ‘The Four Agreements’
1. “Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God.”
The gospel of John in the bible, speaking of the creation of the universe, says; “In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” Through the word, you express your creative power, and it is through the word, you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you are will manifest through the word.
2. “The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human. It is the tool of magic. But like a sword with two edges, your sword can create the most beautiful dream or your word can destroy everything around you.”
Don Miguel Ruiz states that one edge is the misuse of the word, creating a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth. Depending on how the word is used, it can either set you free or enslave you more than you know. Your word is pure magic, and the misuse of your word is black magic.
3. “Even if others insult you directly it has nothing to do with you. What they say and what they do and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds.”
Others’ perspectives or opinions of you come from their subconscious programming received through childhood. Taking things personally makes you easy prey to the predators, the black magicians. They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up. You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take things personally, you are immune in the middle of hell.
4. “Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is really about me, but it is about them.”
If someone says something and you tell them that they are hurting you, it is not others who are hurting you. But they touch the wounds that already exist within you by what they have said. You are hurting yourself when you take it personally. Everyone sees the world with their own 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 or actress, and everyone else is a secondary actor or actress. It is 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 is no one’s truth but yours.
5. “Humans are addicted to suffering at different levels and to different degrees. And we support each other in maintaining these addictions. Humans agree to help each other suffer.”
If you need to be abused, you’ll find it easy to be abused by others. Likewise, if you are with people who need to suffer, something in you makes you abuse them. It’s as if they have a note on their back that says, please kick me. They’re asking for justification for their suffering. Their addiction to suffering is nothing but an agreement that is reinforced every day.
6. “The whole world of control between humans is about making assumptions and taking things personally. Our whole dream of hell is based on that.”
We create a lot of emotional poison by making assumptions and taking it personally because we usually start gossiping about our assumptions. Remember gossiping is how we communicate to each other in the dream of hell and transfer poison to one another. Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions and believe we are right about our assumptions. It is always better to ask questions than to assume because assumptions set us up for suffering. For example, you decide to get married and assume your partner sees marriage the same way you do. Then you live together and find out this isn’t true. It creates many conflicts, but you still don’t try to clarify your feelings about marriage. So we get upset because they fail to meet our expectations. We make assumptions about others as if they know what we want. As if they can read our minds.
7. “Imagine that every single time others gossip to you they insert a computer virus into your mind, causing you to think a little less clearly every time.”
Think back to when you or someone you know was angry with someone else and desired revenge. To seek revenge, you said something to or about that person to spread poison and make that person feel bad about them. When others gossip, imagine, in an effort to clean up your own confusion and get some relief from the poison, you gossip and spread these viruses to someone else. Now imagine this pattern going on in a never-ending chain between all humans on earth. The result is a world full of humans who can only read information through circuits that are clogged with a poisonous and contagious virus.
8. “For years we’ve received the gossip and spells from the words of others but also from the way we use our word with ourselves.”
We talk to ourselves constantly, and most of the time, we say things like, “Oh, I look fat, oh I look ugly, I’m getting old, I’m losing my hair, I’m stupid, I never understand anything, I’ll never be good enough, and I am never going to be perfect.” Do you see how we use the word against ourselves? We must begin to understand what the word is and what the word does. If you understand the first agreement, be impeccable with your word, you begin to see all the changes that can happen in your life. Changes first in the way you deal with yourself and later in the way you deal with other people, especially those you love the most.
