“(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too.”

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too." by Robert M. Pirsig?
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Robert M. Pirsig 164
American writer and philosopher 1928–2017

Related quotes

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo

“Instinct is blind;—a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 7

Carlos Fuentes photo

“The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.”

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican writer

"How I Started to Write", in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.) The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988); cited from Myself With Others (London: Pan, 1989) p. 5.

Novalis photo

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

As quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294

Orhan Pamuk photo
Phillip Guston photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo

“Blind Instinct is indeed annihilated, and in its place there now stands the clearly perceived Shall.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

XIII.
Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge (1810)
Context: I know now that I shall. But all Actual Knowledge brings with it, by its formal nature, its schematised apposition; — although I now know of the Schema of God, yet I am not yet immediately this Schema, but I am only a Schema of the Schema. The required Being is not yet realised.
I shall be. Who is this I? Evidently that which is, — the Ego gives in Intuition, the Individual. This shall be.
What does its Being signify? It is given as a Principle in the World of Sense. Blind Instinct is indeed annihilated, and in its place there now stands the clearly perceived Shall. But the Power that at first set this Instinct in motion remains, in order that the Shall my now set it (the Power) in motion, and become its higher determining Principle. By means of this Power, I shall therefore, within its sphere, — the World of Sense, — produce and make manifest that which I recognise as my true Being in the Supersensuous World.

Apuleius photo

“But he who knows what insanity is, is sane; whereas insanity can no more be sensible of its own existence, than blindness can see itself.”
Sanus est, qui scit quid sit insania, quippe insania scire se non potest, non magis quam caecitas se videre.

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

Related topics