The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
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.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
.Familiarity can blind you too. ){kind=small}
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
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?
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.
Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
The pencil is mightier than the pen.
When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
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.
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....
The more you read, the more you calm down.
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.
The more you look, the more you see.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.
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.
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.
Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
Oh, the laws of physics and of logic…the number system…the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.
A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristics of Quality
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.
Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.
Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought
If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.
One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.
Grades really cover up failure to teach.
The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian.
Not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.
When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man...
Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information.
He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person.
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
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.
Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila
First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.
Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.
The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.
We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.
You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.
Do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good.
Whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
The stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.
It’s important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally…mind control….
An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.
Familiarity can blind you
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.
Metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
That's the way it is. The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die
![Mental reflection os so much more interesting than tv [that]it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/robert-m-pirsig-46181.jpg)
Mental reflection os so much more interesting than tv [that]it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is.
When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.
To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.
