Zitat des Tages von Robert M. Pirsig:
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
There's no such thing as morality.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
If you run from technology, it will chase you.
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'
If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.