Slow day at work....
Top 25 Dharma-related quotes from Fight Club:
1. What it feels like sometime trying to learn this stuff.
"Lou: [Lou hits Tyler in the face] Do you hear me now?
Tyler Durden: No, I didn't quite catch that, Lou.
[Lou hits Tyler again]
Tyler Durden: Still not getting it.
[Lou hits Tyler a few more times]
Tyler Durden: Ok, I got it. Shit, I lost it.
[Lou continues to beat up Tyler]"
2. On the illusory nature of grasping & impermanence.
"Narrator: I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.
Tyler Durden: Shit man, now it's all gone.
Narrator: It's just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need. Whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled.
Tyler Durden: Well you did lose a lot of versatile solutions for modern living.
...
Tyler Durden: I say frak Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man. So frak off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may."
3. On rebirth.
"You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"
4. On karma.
"Hey, you created me. I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!"
5. On the cherishing of self.
"Self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction... "
6. Accepting impermanence.
"First you have to give up, first you have to *know*... not fear... *know*... that someday you're gonna die."
7. On waking up to the illusory nature of grasping.
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
8. On renunciation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
9. Non-self. Last part may be emptiness of self.
"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your frak khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
10. Nonduality & emptiness of absolute/inherent existence
"When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake."
11. The nature of craving.
"The things you own end up owning you."
12. More on impermanence.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
13. Something about this makes me think of Enlightenment.
"And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."
14. Still more on impermanence.
"Hey, even the Mona Lisa's falling apart."
15. What I have to constantly remind myself.
"frak what you know. You need to forget about what you know, that's your problem. Forget about what you think you know about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me."
16. On the illusory nature of life.
"Is Tyler my bad dream? Or am I Tyler's?"
17. On identifying the external as Self
"Narrator: Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME!
[voice-over]
Narrator: I'd like to thank the Academy..."
18. A rather obvious one that's somewhat surface-level.
"Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I'm comfortable with that. I am enlightened."
19. On the illusion of grasping.
"We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession."
20. On renunciation & the Dharma
"You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide."
21. More on the mis-identification of self.
"I flipped through catalogs and wondered: What kind of dining set defines me as a person?"
22. Enlightenment:
"...isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!"
23. On cyclic existence of samsara
"Deja vu - all over again."
24. On renunciation:
"By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV."
25. On emptiness of inherent existence & interdependent origination:
"We are all part of the same compost heap."
