“A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/robert-pirsig-dead-wrote-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance.html
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Robert M. Pirsig 164
American writer and philosopher 1928–2017Related quotes
“Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 6
Context: The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”
“Various Arts by study might be wrought
Up to their height.”
The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Georgicks
“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”
L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale.
La Mare au Diable, ch. 1 (1851); Frank Hunter Potter (trans.) The Haunted Pool (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1895) p. 15
“To study the art of living is to engage in one of its forms.”
Source: The Art of Living (1998), p. 15.
“The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.”
What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
Intentions (1891)
Letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)
1780s
Context: The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
“Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.”
Adde quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.
II, ix, 47
Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Black Sea)