Riding that ridge between reason and recklessness, stillness and speed, is the first, maybe the most important, thing I learned about motorcycles.
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.
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
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.
My parents won’t let me have a motorcycle, but they give me all the guns I want. I asked them for a motorcycle last Christmas and they told me I’d only kill myself. They got me this twelve-gauge instead.
All girls like guys who are tough. Obviously, riding a motorcycle - I don't want to say that there's a bad boy quality - but there's definitely a tough and macho thing about a guy who rides a motorcycles and that element of danger. That's really sexy...
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Wandering around our America has changed me more than I thought. I am not me any more. At least I'm not the same me I was.
Motorcycle Cop: Do you know what the penalty for animal cruelty is in this state? Clark: No, sir, I don't. Motorcycle Cop: Well... it's probably pretty stiff.
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...
The connection to place, to the land, the wind, the sun, stars, the moon... it sounds romantic, but it's true - the visceral experience of motion, of moving through time on some amazing machine - a few cars touch on it, but not too many compared to m...
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.
Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?" "If you take care of it." "What do you have to do?" "Lot's of things. You've been watching me." "Will you show me all of them?" "Sure." "Is it hard?" "Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having th...
Mr. Fox: [Mr. Fox on a motorcycle speaking to a wolf off on a distant ridge] Where did you come from? Mr. Fox: What are you doing here? Mr. Fox: I don't think he speaks English or Latin Mr. Fox: Pensez-vous que l'hiver sera rude? Mr. Fox: [as an asid...
I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
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 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.
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.
Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see...
You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.
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.
