The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
Category Archive: Robert M. Pirsig
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: ‘No, I didn’t screw up.’
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.
If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness… If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it, no one knows it is there.