Notes & Quotes: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

The following are my favorite quotes from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
  1. At age eleven you don't get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds. You have to get older for that.
  2. You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other.
  4. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.
  6. Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as "education."
  7. If someone's ungrateful and you tell them he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name.  You haven't solved anything.
  10. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with the other.
  17. What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?...How do we really know anything?
  18. The harder you think in this high country  of the mind the slower you go.
  19. Suppose a child is born devoid of all senses; he has no sight, no hearing, no touch, no smell, no taste -- nothing. There's no way whatsoever for him to receive any sensations from the outside world. And suppose this child is fed intravenously and otherwise attended to and kept alive for eighteen years in this state of existence.  The question is then asked: Does this eighteen-year-old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it?
  20. The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
  21.  When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals,it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
  23. The test of the machine is the satisfaction is gives you. There isn't any other test.  If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
  24. You look at where you're going and where you're at and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
  25. It's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged.
  26. Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
  27. To live only for some future goal is shallow.
  28. Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
  30. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
  32. 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.
  33. The silence allows you to do each thing right.
  34. When the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a trinity of quality, mind, and matter, then the art of motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never had.
  36. The more general a fact, the more precious it is.
  37. Care 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 person who's bound to have some characteristics of Quality.
  38. Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.
  39. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn't a train we are examining. That's why we get stuck.
  41. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
  42. At the moment of pure Quality, subject and object are identical.
  43. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.
  46. When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.
  50. A gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one's enthusiasm for what one is doing.
  51. Intermittent [setbacks] become gumption traps when they fool you into thinking you've really got the machine fixed. It's always a good idea on any job to wait a few hundred miles before coming to that conclusion.
  52. Always take the old part with you to prevent getting a wrong part. Take along some machinist's calipers for comparing dimensions.
  53. If you're values are rigid you can't really learn new facts.
  54. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
  55. When beginning a repair job you can list everything you're going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on.
  56. Boredom means you're off the Quality track, you're not seeing thing freshly, you've lost your "beginner's mind."
  57. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.
  58. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said "Mu," meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly.
  59. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret it.
  60. Pay attention to adequate lighting. It's amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent.
  61. This is how it was before the white man came -- beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere -- but now that the white man is here, it looks fake.
the ripening, notes, quotes, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig