01c. 1972 ADThis is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
02c. 1972 ADOr winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and coldRobert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
03c. 1972 ADA slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
04c. 1972 ADWhat was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
05c. 1972 ADCare and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
06c. 1972 ADWhy should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
07c. 1972 ADIt was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
08c. 1972 ADMountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless speed up. If you become winded slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then when you're no longer thinking ahead each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
09c. 1972 ADThe only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
10c. 1972 ADHistorically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
11c. 1972 ADWe do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
12c. 1972 ADQuality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
13c. 1972 ADTraditional 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.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
15c. 1972 ADThe 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.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
18c. 1972 ADTo live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.Robert M. Pirsig / quote ↗
