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dd5229f
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Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5b91b0f
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Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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8389046
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He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn't what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4e9784d
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The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual's toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. 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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cc9baa4
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that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife. "The sun of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!"
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a95a274
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You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f2ef1a7
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And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To"
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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195c2f4
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Perhaps because of these changes 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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3b7f70b
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huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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4f35ed5
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But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b29e1ac
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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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67fb69d
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There is no evidence anywhere that he ever thought of his expulsion from the university as a failure, just an enigma. The explanation I've come to arises from the discrepancy between his lack of faith in scientific reason in the laboratory and his fanatic faith expressed in the Church of Reason lecture. I was thinking about the discrepancy one day and it suddenly came to me that it wasn't a discrepancy at all. His lack of faith in reason wa..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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af04e0a
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Quality...you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all pract..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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bae1331
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Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ec78d3f
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ae14368
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He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then will be here.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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76458be
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He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d3e2e13
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Actually, a root word of technology, , originally meant "art". The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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f83cb9f
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What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a99a165
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Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5aa6fbb
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The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9221ca0
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the track of Quality preselects what data we're going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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96a5d0d
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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. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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6d2438a
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Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock loo..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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ab1174e
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You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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9728cb7
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The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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acd0a95
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Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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aa9dbdf
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Tate explained that James was able to achieve this magic through the use of the first-person narrator. Tate said that the first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can't get out. He can't say "meanwhile, back at the ranch" as a transition to another subject because he is imprisoned forever inside the narrator. But so is the reader! And that is the strength of the first-person na..
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puzzle
unreliable-narrator
villain
writing
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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37ef5a6
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physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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91b94d3
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Cerchi di capire dove stai andando e dove sei, e ti sembra che la tua vita non abbia senso. Ma quando dai uno sguardo indietro si delineano delle costanti, e se ti proietti in avanti partendo da quelle, a volte ti capita di scoprire qualcosa.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5f841db
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But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind!...Ghosts."
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b86c79b
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It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appeali..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c9e099e
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And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture--two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really--despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might think.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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c10a3ee
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Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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10ceed2
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Cromwell's statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going,"
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0e15054
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Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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1ddf645
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It's not the technology that's scary. It's what it does to the relations between people,
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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80a630c
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I always feel like I'm in church when I do this...The
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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716567c
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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. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immedia..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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5b07c80
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An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don't like it when you talk to them because they are co..
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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656195c
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He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.
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ideographs
language
yes-and-no
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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fa6e0d5
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The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future.
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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77e1b33
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Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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d1d8477
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Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. The
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Robert M. Pirsig |