“What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought—occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like—because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 14
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Robert M. Pirsig 164
American writer and philosopher 1928–2017Related quotes
Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (February 1996)
1990s
Context: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Mind Alteration, http://www.reason.com/news/show/32215.html an article published in Reason Magazine in July 1994.
The War on Drugs
Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 41
A Voice from the Attic (1960)
Context: There is no reason to suppose that people today feel less than their grandfathers, but there is good reason to think that they are less able to read in a way which makes them feel. It is natural for them to blame books rather than themselves, and to demand fiction which is highly peppered, like a glutton whose palate is defective.
2021, July 2021, Remarks by President Biden At Signing of An Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy
Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man
2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)