Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Context: No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom.
Now he is speechless. He can't think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn't understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.
Robert M. Pirsig:
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Robert M. Pirsig Quotes
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7
Context: They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Context: For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.
He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.
But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart — to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning "mind."
Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 1
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Is it hard?'
Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 26
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
The quote is from section 258d of the dialogue Phædrus (tr. Benjamin Jowett).
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Context: A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus. "And what is written well and what is written badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“The more you look, the more you see.”
Variant: The more you read, the more you calm down.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 24
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 14
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)
“I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 14
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
