Quotes from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Consider this:

1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?

And here's a bonus question:

2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“This world is better than Utopia because - and follow this point carefully - you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That's the very definition of Utopia.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is "higher" and the other is "mundane" is like eating a banana and complaining it's not a very good apple.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Zen replaces all objects of belief with one single thing: reality itself. We believe only in this universe. We don't believe in the afterlife. We don't believe in the sovereignty of nations. We don't believe in money or power or fame. We don't believe in our idols. We don't believe in our positions or our possessions. We don't believe we can be insulted, or that our honor or the honor of our family, our nation or our faith can be offended. We don't believe in Buddha. We just believe in reality. Just this.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true. From birth to death it's just like this”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“It's a frightening thing to be truly honest with yourself. It means you have no one left to turn to anymore, no-one to blame, and to one to look to for salvation. You have to give up any possibility that there will ever be any refuge for you. You have to accept the reality that you are truly and finally on your own. The best thing you can hope for in life is to meet a teacher who will smash all of your dreams, dash all of your hopes, tear your teddy-bear beliefs out of your arms and fling them over a cliff.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we're living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“You can master tantric yogic poly-orgasmic Wonder Sex but you're still gonna die alone.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“You can't life in paradise- but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“But don't get too hung up on the future. The future's out of your control. Enjoy what's happening right now. Do what is appropriate, what is right, in the present moment and let the future be the future.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“The first noble truth, suffering, represents idealism. When you look at things from an idealistic viewpoint everything sucks, as the Descendents said in the song called “Everything Sucks” (from the album Everything Sucks). Nothing can possibly live up to the ideals and fantasies you’ve created. So we suffer because things are not the way we think they ought to be. Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we’re living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Zen does not ask you to believe in anything you cannot confirm for yourself. It does not ask you to memorize any sacred words. It does not require you to worship any particular thing or revere any particular person. It does not offer any rules to obey. It does not give you any hierarchy of learned men whose profound teachings you must follow to the letter. It does not ask you to conform any code of dress. It does not ask you to allow anyone else to choose what is right for you and what is wrong. Zen is complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority. Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real. That's real refuge.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Nothing can be separated from everything else.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Maybe your lot right now could be improved. I know mine could. And working to make things better is great. But we don’t just work to make things better and leave it at that, do we? We live in the idealized world inside our heads. And that keeps us from ever really enjoying what we have right now, from enjoying the work that we’re doing to create our better tomorrow. It’s as if we’re afraid to really commit to this moment because a better one might come along later. This approach is totally ridiculous and completely absurd.*”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Same deal here. It's not "you" and "the universe." It's "universeyou.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“You've won all creation. It's yours to do with it as you please- and you discover what pleases you most is doing the right thing for all creation in moment after moment.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful, And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“You can get hooked on afterlife ideas just like a drug. The reason to avoid ideas about life after death isn't because they couldn't possibly be true. Maybe they could. How would I know? It's because ideas like that promote a kind of dreamy fantasy state that distracts us from seeing what our life is right now.

"The question doesn't fit the case."

Look at your life as it is right now and live it, right now.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are. Stop for a second and look at this in your life right now. It’s important.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“When you’re so committed to the future, it’s real easy to let your life right now turn to shit.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“...you look out at the clear blue sky and for an instant you see that you are everything. You want to say something, but none of the words you have will stick at all; nothing will come except for a wide, wide smile that crosses all of space at time---and the moment is utterly forgotten”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“This is always and inevitably the case. No one gets away with murder. No one gets away with anything. You can't escape the consequences of your immoral acts any more than someone who drops a big-ass amp directly on his foot can escape having broken toe-bones. Your life and the life of everyone else in the universe are one seamless whole. To cause another living being pain isn't evil-it's just stupid. Because that being is you.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

“Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority. Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real. That’s real refuge.”
― Brad Warner, quote from Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality

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Popular quotes

“I always wonder about raindrops.

I wonder about how they're always falling down, tripping over their own feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble right out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It's like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn't seem to care where the contents fall, doesn't seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors.

I am a raindrop.

My parents emptied their pockets of me and left me to evaporate on a concrete slab.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Shatter Me

“Is this a movie?' I heard someone ask.
Naw- this is too original for Hollywood. They do sequels.”
― James Patterson, quote from The Angel Experiment

“I will here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre existing forms. Passing over allusions to the subject in the classical writers (Aristotle, in his "Physicae Auscultationes" (lib.2, cap.8, s.2), after remarking that rain does not fall in order to make the corn grow, any more than it falls to spoil the farmer's corn when threshed out of doors, applies the same argument to organisation; and adds (as translated by Mr. Clair Grece, who first pointed out the passage to me), "So what hinders the different parts (of the body) from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished and still perish." We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle, is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teeth.), the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon. But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of species, I need not here enter on details.”
― Charles Darwin, quote from The Origin of Species

“I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“democracy is a see-saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from A Fine Balance

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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