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dd6c510
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Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.
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nothing-to-say
writing-craft
practice
writing-process
writers
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2b7c2a9
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But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought ab..
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work
automaton
employees
mindless
mindfulness
mindset
sheep
perspective
quality
consciousness
awareness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7afeabd
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To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.
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romantic
philosophy
rational
perspective
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4a07bd7
|
Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. ..
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philosophy
quality-of-work
workman
professional
flow
style
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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66c2290
|
What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And ..
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thoughts
philosophy
modern-problems
solutions
rational
thinking
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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30e222f
|
This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6eda6b9
|
The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusi..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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af078a3
|
On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4cac2b8
|
Kad jedna osoba pati od iluzije,
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poremećenost
um
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5dd9611
|
During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny i..
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discoveries
evolution
philosophy
renaissance
civilization
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4249c9c
|
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha--which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a5b1b38
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Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what i..
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writing
rules-of-english-language
montana
grammar
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a67b24b
|
The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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02703ab
|
It's a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2bd3a97
|
I don't know why--it's just that--I don't know--they're not kin."--Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin--sounds like hillbilly talk--not of a kind--same root--kindness, too--they can't have real kindness toward him, they're not his kin -- . That's exactly the feeling. Old word, so ancient it's almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. E..
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words
kindness
family
kin
society
language
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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35885de
|
The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7fa5eeb
|
Another one is cleaning up tool that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
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motorcycle-maintenance
frustration
impatience
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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21c64db
|
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you wer..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7a94bed
|
to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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22831e8
|
And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f6d92b9
|
What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge,
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d59c39c
|
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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b93ec88
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Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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cefb1af
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Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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8ae6e42
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I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2aff63c
|
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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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89703ed
|
physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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e62c84e
|
The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0db2143
|
I know what it is! We've arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4e2aa16
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Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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899fade
|
The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience--chaos.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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90e8112
|
We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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009efba
|
The statement "To travel is better than to arrive" comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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575da08
|
I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c7376d0
|
The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high-school lab notebo..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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491aaf4
|
A copy of Thoreau's Walden... which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Som..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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27f85d9
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I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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932df81
|
A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ec3ccbb
|
What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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abee3cb
|
When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what's going on.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f65964a
|
Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish "principles" and study "methods" and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries--the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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df1c6cd
|
You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?" But Phaedrus is prepared. "Forensic, deliberative and epideictic," he answers calmly. "What are the epideictic techniques?" "The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7efa1cb
|
The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year ..
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philosophy
motorcycle
differences
mechanics
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4cf7785
|
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
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Robert M. Pirsig |