“Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.”

Address to the Annual Dinner of the Canadian Press, Toronto, April 18, 1956
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Context: It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. 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. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses.

Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20
Context: In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix, p. 489
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

In an interview at the Design Museum (2003)[citation needed]

Sticky Wickets (1950), ASIN: B0000CHN1L

Man and Space - Mensch und Raum 2005

Source: 1980s, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism (1986), p. 43