Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward in...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are dif...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assumes its tr...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great m...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

The more you read, the more you calm down.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

This forest silence improves anyone.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

…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...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

grades really cover up failure to teach.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And w...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

… 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.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values