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6f8955c
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If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.
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stupidity
rational-thought
language
logic
irrationality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7bcb642
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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01e7e19
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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination--"unstuckness," in other words--are completely outside its domain."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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cddcf48
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To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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1d40f38
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Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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fa1baf8
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Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes thought of by romantics as all of science itself because that's the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of test tubes and bizarre equipment and people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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118816a
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Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.
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motorcycle-maintenance
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5acec87
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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.
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thoughts
mindfulness
possibilities
perspective
zen
thinking
questions
ideas
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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8d6fd67
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the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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67c657a
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To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands tha..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c3c7e55
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The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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80ec1c0
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Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents. He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enou..
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faith
soul-searching
mindfulness
mountains
devotion
journey
insight
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f9692e5
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You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ad94676
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Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there's nothing ahead but increasing darkness.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f84064a
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Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c1b2f16
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He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting. That's what the insanity is. She's adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn't necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn't necessarily a disease. It could be pa..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0a8f595
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To discover a metaphysical relationship between Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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abf02b7
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grades really cover up failure to teach.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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77d9449
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metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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3f21a8b
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The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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be06bb0
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An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a3a79d9
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It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally...mind control....
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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dd4a952
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Berge sollte man mit moglichst wenig Anstrengung und ohne Ehrgeiz ersteigen. Unsere eigene Natur sollte das Tempo bestimmen. Wenn man unruhig wird, geht man schneller. Wenn man zu keuchen anfangt, geht man langsamer. Man steigt auf den Berg in einem Zustand, in dem sich Rastlosigkeit und Erschopfung die Waage halten. Dann, wenn man nicht mehr in Gedanken vorauseilt, ist jeder Schritt nicht mehr bloss ein Mittel zum Zweck, sondern ein einmal..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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e4dc84e
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Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, 'I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat,' that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, 'All I see is an ink-blot,' he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate li..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6e8f237
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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 of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordanc..
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reason
philosophy
motorcycle-maintenance
motorcycle
rationality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0d8a7a3
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There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.
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perfection
philosophy
motorcycle-maintenance
motorcycles
rationality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ac513c3
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It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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985ab32
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That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind [...] I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this--that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes--pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts--all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a..
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philosophy
foundry
machining
welding
motorcycle-maintenance
motorcycles
steel
mechanics
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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841d54c
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So green this summer and so fresh. There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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636b35d
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The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information..
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nature
scientific-method
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4c3365c
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From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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30ff25a
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The solutions all are simple--after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
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philosophy
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2d4a698
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It should be inserted here parenthetically that there's a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn't getting into a complex assembly I don't know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. Thats a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I'd like to see wiped out. [...] You're at a disadvantage the first time around it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it wil..
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sense-of-accomplishment
do-it-yourself
motorcycle-maintenance
motorcycles
mechanics
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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998357f
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In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, "See?...See?" and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. 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 se..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ccbdf89
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It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d269df3
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What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
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the-time-is-now
wherever-you-go-there-you-are
surroundings
the-moment
zen
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b717357
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I turn my head from side to side.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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07ba793
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In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, "See?...See?" and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. 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 se..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ba33b4f
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I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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053e5e6
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Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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39c760d
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You never gain something but that you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth--but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of ..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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037c96c
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You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.
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care
music
work-environment
observations
distractions
excellence
habits
quality
consciousness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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3f9e2f6
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whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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95d3943
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Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other. What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an..
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Robert M. Pirsig |