Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
— Robert M. Pirsig
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
Quality is the Buddha.
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.'
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
To live 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.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
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.
If you run from technology, it will chase you.
There's no such thing as morality.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
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?
What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
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.
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.
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.
To live only 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 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.
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'
It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.
The Buddha resides 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.
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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.
I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
