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964cb87
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If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.
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rationality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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291e758
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You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isn't a mechanic alive who doesn't louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don't hear about it--just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at least get the benefit of some education.
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motorcycle-maintenance
maintenance
learning-from-mistakes
mechanics
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a080462
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He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4f30b80
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A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b99d42d
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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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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191bd4e
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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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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3229135
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You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7838b56
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The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. T..
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truth
lateral-thinking
knowledge
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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34312f2
|
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 different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there's no logical basis for substance then there's no logical basis for conclud..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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cfd7b22
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Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
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memories
depression
stress-reliever
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2e2a30c
|
The main skill is to keep from getting lost. Since the roads are used only by local people who know them by sight nobody complains if the junctions aren't posted. And often they aren't. When they are it's usually a small sign hiding unobtrusively in the weeds and that's all. County-road-sign makers seldom tell you twice. If you miss that sign in the weeds that's your problem, not theirs. Moreover, you discover that the highway maps are ofte..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c10cea1
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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.
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nature
philosophy
mountains
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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baeebe0
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There is mountain air in this room. It's cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in - brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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fa91987
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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.
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philosophy
discovering-new-things
getting-reacquainted
motorcycles
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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580ceb9
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What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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eb0a9ad
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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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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8a7872d
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Little children were trained not to do "just what they liked" but...but what?...Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise "just what you like" then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others--a good slave. When you learn not to do "just what you like" then the System loves you."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5c1c6fe
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Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. F..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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04420a8
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Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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122dffc
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Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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961e6e4
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Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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3c22851
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She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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56d359a
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I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature... I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important and products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are righ..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c615836
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What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream." --
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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84289ab
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Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0001c93
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If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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bf22005
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When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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222f4b3
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Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.
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words
reason
legal-arguments
definitions
foundation
law
logic
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9adc8cf
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The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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701ce5e
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My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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72212bc
|
John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d3aabd8
|
not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6360409
|
But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, , originally "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them."
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history
philosophy
manufacturing
technology
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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76702de
|
it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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40bd9bd
|
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. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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41e6b9e
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Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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fd6e2b2
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To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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22a8e28
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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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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196cafa
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Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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bb81f71
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Familiarity can blind you
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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31a1d30
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That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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29b29b3
|
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."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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1e7fa69
|
The idea that "all men are created equal" is a gift to the world from the American Indian."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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dd60cd7
|
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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |