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1db5f69
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I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0368676
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Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all. Coming back I comment, "He'll ..
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learning
motorcycle-mechanics
motorcycles
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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37ef0eb
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I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a86cb42
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A very strong case can be made for the statement that 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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3b6cbb9
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The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious ..
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desolation
loneliness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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883c498
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We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ba3a6c1
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Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing's quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c06889c
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For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a2d40b1
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Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
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intelligence
logic
philosophy
rationale
reason
reasoning
thinking
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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19b3ff3
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My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, y..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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efc4322
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Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9153c4c
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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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f009458
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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.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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52ed081
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When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts--something is always created too. And instea..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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e79794e
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You never gain something but that you lose something.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2c0b9bb
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He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The aut..
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how-to-write
learning
outlines
quality
research
rhetoric
teaching
what-is-quality
writing-craft
writing-process
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c749720
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Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know.
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methodology
questions
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c406952
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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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00b91c1
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The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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23d10fb
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Between the lines Phaedrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal smugness of the professional academician.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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70bd779
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Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0a6e66f
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You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anym..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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e6abf27
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But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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83c00a0
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The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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bd6c9a9
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The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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71d90fe
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When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.
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education
how-teaching-kills-creativity
schooling
schools
teaching
university
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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31adf83
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If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assumes its true importance. It seemed small because our previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this st..
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getting-stuck-in-your-head
philosophy
thinking-process
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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e3a1c04
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The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat,
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5dd0c80
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It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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61c9e30
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He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that's not there.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6787fec
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If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that you've just goofed, you're not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you're likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You're always being fooled, you're always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a b..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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27714c3
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They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6d0d36d
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The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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1b6b1a6
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Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices--TV, jets, freeways and so on--but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d16558f
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We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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17d6d49
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The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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2e1859a
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But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -- religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals -- they're all the sam..
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philosophy
psychology
zen
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b11e3d6
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When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a624b9f
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You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. 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 |
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64f5ef1
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The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that 'Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' [he
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9670824
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Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret it.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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3e2e6ab
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One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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22375b7
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What you need is an hypothesis for how you're going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around. This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9fb4ea7
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These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely you're bound to be very discouraged very soon if you've derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.
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Robert M. Pirsig |