Zen Motorcycle Maintenance Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig, Roger Tory Peterson, Mark Richardson, Austin Peck and many others.
Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
In the temple of science are many mansions … and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
The real University… has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues… The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.
…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
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.
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The more you look, the more you see.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
