Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
49 quotes
"An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"He felt that 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. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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?"
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"...."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"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. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values