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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2d53c0b | The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions a.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 040c57a | It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| a31e925 | Drifting is what one does | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| ecf49b3 | We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 371f235 | And from time to time you find your "county road" takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer's backyard." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 9619885 | 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 6a5e67e | the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| cb239bf | It's not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It's all of technology they can't take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia's irritation at a friend who thought computer programming was 'creative.' All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she's not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger a.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| e54f223 | To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn't because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comp.. | meaning philosophy words zen | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 7d8e4a5 | So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves. | inspirational travel | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| fbd8c5d | 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. | english insight language observations wonder | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| c9538e7 | These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| f6d729a | What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it.. | american-history awareness chautauqua consciousness enlightenment entertainment media philosophy | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| dd6c510 | 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. | nothing-to-say practice writers writing-craft writing-process | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 2b7c2a9 | 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.. | automaton awareness consciousness employees mindfulness mindless mindset perspective quality sheep work | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 7afeabd | To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. | perspective philosophy rational romantic | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 1aac290 | If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of me.. | crime lies perception truth | Don DeLillo | |
| e15def0 | Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 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. .. | flow philosophy professional quality-of-work style workman | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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 .. | modern-problems philosophy rational solutions thinking thoughts | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 4cac2b8 | Kad jedna osoba pati od iluzije, | poremećenost um | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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.. | civilization discoveries evolution philosophy renaissance | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 2309a9d | The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations. | Don DeLillo | ||
| a5b1b38 | 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.. | grammar montana rules-of-english-language writing | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| a67b24b | The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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.. | family kin kindness language society words | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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 | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | frustration impatience motorcycle-maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 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.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 22831e8 | And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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, | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| b93ec88 | Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| cefb1af | Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 8ae6e42 | I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 89703ed | physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 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. | Robert M. Pirsig |