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Fight Club is a movie that I have refused to watch for years.

I basically refrained from seeing it because I had wrongly judged the story by its title.

I thought it was one of those shallow movies where two men keep on fighting in a ring until someone dies. I kept hearing from everyone that Fight Club was interesting, but nothing would change my mind back then.

Four years ago I started getting drawn to the spiritual path. I had many realizations that I haven’t before, and I started to understand more about life, humans, and society. As I was discussing once our identification with forms and the material world, the subject of Fight Club came up. Mentioning this movie in a spiritual/conscious conversation caught my attention. This is when I realized that it probably had deeper meanings than I thought.

Once I finally saw it, I had to watch it several more times to fully grasp its messages, and righteousness. Fight Club mainly talks about how much our society is identified with money, materialism, and plenty of other shallow things. Its deeper meaning is our identification with forms, and how with time we become slaves to them. Moreover, this movie teaches us abundant lessons about life, and conveys hidden messages about consciousness, the ego, and spirituality.

I now feel that this is the most important movie I have ever seen.. Not only do I recommend it, but I think everyone should reflect on it too. I have gathered 21 of my favorite quotes from the movie. Personally, I highly consider them thought-provoking, deep, and true:

“The things you own end up owning you.”

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

“And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”

“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 f*cking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

“Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

“Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’ll 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.”

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own end up owning you.”

“Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don’t need.”

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

“You are not special! You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake! You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else!”

“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.”

“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.”

“Reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”

“F*ck off with your sofa units and serene green stripe patterns. I say, never be complete. I say, stop being perfect. I say, let… let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

“If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

“F*ck 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.”

“Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again, resurrected.”

 Relephant:

20 Powerful Spiritual Quotes from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

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Author: Elyane Youssef

Editor: Travis May

Photo: Movie Stills