Peaceful Warrior

Quotes taken from the movie, Peaceful Warrior....

• There are no ordinary moments.


• This moment is the only thing that matters.


• Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness…if you had little time left to live…you would waste precious little of it. Well, I'm telling you…you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason…or you will never be at all.


• The first realization of a warrior is not knowing.


• Every action has it's pleasure and it's price.


• You haven't yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior's way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability…to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I've shown you by example that a warrior's life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior's sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death.


• Find the love in what you do.


• Everything has a purpose. It's up to you to find it.


• If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.


• Some people live their whole lives without ever waking up.


• Knowledge is not the same as wisdom.


• Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation…is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.


• I call myself a Peaceful Warrior…because the real battles we fight are on the inside.


• Find your answers from inside.


• Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is…the only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.


• Those who are hardest to love are the ones who need it most.


• Throw out everything that is keeping you from this moment.


• Where are you? Here. What time is it? Now. What are you? This moment.


• There is never nothing going on.


• Three principles of reality: Paradox, Humor, and Change.


• There is only the journey.

I'm no Siskel or Ebert. I don't know if the acting was particularly great. I only know that after watching Peaceful Warrior, the sentiment of the movie and the quotes I listed above stayed with me for many days, and will likely continue to motivate me for a long time.