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Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Quotes of Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
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  1. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton." ...and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It 's a ghost!"Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. it's that only that gets me. science is only in your mind too, it's just that that doesn't make it bad. or ghosts either."Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Law of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts."...we see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.
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  2. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
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  3. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some material thing to center itself upon.
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  4. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down – you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not – but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you'll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it. That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.
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  5. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Sonunda kendini yüceltmeyi amaç edinen her çaba felaketle sonlanmaya yazgılıdır. Bir dağa, ne kadar büyük olduğunuzu kanıtlamak için tırmanıyorsanız, hemen hemen hiçbir zaman sağlayamazsınız bunu. Tırmansanız bile içi boş bir zafer olur bu. zaferi sürdürmek için kendinizi tekrar tekrar başka yollarla kanıtlamak, sahte bir imajı tekrar tekrar oluşturmak; peşinizde bu imajın doğru olmadığı ve birinin bunu anlayacağı korkusuyla sonsuza dek bu imajı sağlamak zorundasınızdır. Bu çıkar yol değildir.
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  6. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    DeWeese asks, 'Does this tie in with what you were doing on "Quality?"''It's the direct result of it,' I say.I remember something and look at DeWeese. 'Didn't you advise me to drop it?''I said no one had ever succeeded in doing what you were trying to do.''Do you think it's possible?''I don't know. Who knows?' His expression is really concerned. 'A lot of people are listening better these days. Particularly the kids. They're really listening... and not just at you- to you... to you. It makes all the difference.
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  7. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.
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  8. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    The divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated.
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  9. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an "I" a "soul," which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?
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  10. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Quality isn't a substance. Neither is it a method. It's outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn't method. It's the goal toward which method is aimed.
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  11. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
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  12. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    It's proper to begin with the regular facts, but after a rule is established beyond all doubt, the facts in conformity with it become dull because they no longer teach us anything new. Then it's the exception that becomes important. We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they're the most striking and also the most instructive.
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