Robert M. Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Quotes
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
Dad?""What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us."What should I be when I grow up?"The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest, " I finally say.
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
This forest silence improves anyone.
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth, " and so it goes away. Puzzling.
grades really cover up failure to teach.
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.
