80 Quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Robert Pirsig

This is a unique first-hand perspective on mental illness, the struggle of family, the journey of peace, and the open road. Enjoy the selections!

1. “And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good-need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

2. “I’m happy to be riding back in this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because it’s just that.”

 

3. “At age 11 you don’t get very impressed with red-wing blackbirds. You have to get older for that.”

4. “Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere.”

5. “ She wasn’t ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! But she cannot admit the importance of this for some reason.”

6. “The Buddha, the godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer in the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. Do you think otherwise is to demean the Buddha-which is to demean oneself.”

7. “I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”

8. “To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land.”

9. “When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”

10. “We are, all of us, very arrogant and conceited about running down other peoples’ ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

11. “Practicality isn’t the whole thing.”

12. “The new ones (motorcycles) start out as good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long lasting friends.”

13. “If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.”

14. “As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”

15. “Follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.”

16. “Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

17. “I would think mental illness comes before thought.” This doesn’t make much sense to them, I’m sure.”

18. “‘How did you know how to do that?” He asks. “You just have to figure it out.” “I wouldn’t know where to start,“ he says. I think to myself, that’s the problem, all right, where to start. To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looks like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic enquiry.… I repack the tool kit and close the side cover plates and think to myself, he’s worth reaching though.”

19. “You discuss things in terms of your immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form… A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is it surface. So, complex list of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.”

20. “Familiarity can blind us too.”

21. “From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. Once we have the handful of sand… a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts…You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end, somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.”

22. “The Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said… When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, (the Buddha) something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. But what is less noticed in the arts-something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process (of experiencing from a classical or romantic lens) as a kind of death – birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.”

23. “Your opinions block the way.”

24. “One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.”

25. “In pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he was a fanatic hunter… I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achieved.”

26. “They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garment worn by the personality, not the other way around.”

27. “Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.” (Much like a mind)

28. “If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information (or nature), giving it a flourish here and there, nature will soon make a complete fool out of you… One must be extremely and rigidly logical when dealing with nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine (or the nature of something) and you can get hung up and definitely.”

29. “The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind (the sciences) is a kin to third of the religious worshiper or lover. The daily effort comes from no delivered intention of program, but straight from the heart.”

30. “Failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines.”

31. “In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he (Phadrus) later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one.” (Think of the flower sermon of the Buddha)

32. “In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on, obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out… The harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go.”

33. “Hume (Scottish philosopher) had previously submitted that if one follows the strictest rules of logical induction and deduction from experience to determine the true nature of the world, one must arrive at certain conclusions. His reasoning followed lines that would result from answers to this question: 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 18 years in the state of existence. The question is then asked: does this 18 year old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it? Hume would have answered that the 18-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and then giving this answer it would have defined self as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses.” 

34. “It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.”

35. “He became aware that the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. In all of the oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou Art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.”

36. “Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him…He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.”

37. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. 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.”

38. “Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,“ I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate tests always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”

39. “The act of pronouncing it wrong is a form of caring.”

40. “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archaeologists to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly (Robert is talking about putting together a rotisserie chicken oven) is actually a long lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.“ They’re not sure whether I’m kidding or not. “You mean,” DeWerse asks, “that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?” “Sure.”

41. “A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which new material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cooled a solution, the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t know how. They require some thing to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.“(Seed crystal can be a metaphor for what is necessary to initiate the meditative journey)

42. “Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”

43. “Heaven above fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, where is “above.””

44. “For every fact there is an infinity of hypothesis.”

45. “She had to do some original indirect seeing… Imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seem to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seem to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.”

46. “Mountains 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. And then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself… To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”

47. “We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shark is hard to recover from.”

48. “When I say, “quality can’t be defined, “I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about quality.”

49. “Quality, in terms of… analogy, was an attempt to break the grip of the classical sand-sifting mode of (analytic) understanding and find a point of common understanding between a classic (square aka not cool) and romantic (hip, emotional, cool) worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it.“

50. “It’s an old rule of logic that the competence of a speaker has no relevance to the truth of what he says... The world’s biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out.“

51. “The idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. It’s the basis of Zen practice.”

52. “Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity… Quality is not a thing. It is an event… Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.“

53. “The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It is not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it.”

54. “First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.”

55. “The silence allows you to do each thing right.”

56. “Zen is the spirit of the valley, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the top of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”

57. “To discover a metaphysical relationship of quality (the attractive nature of reality, it’s magnificent, especially in regards to consciousness) and the Buddha at some mountain top of personal experience is very spectacular. And very important.”

58. “That which is generally adopted is only more convenient.” (Is there a value or quality to inconvenience?)

59. “Care and quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees quality and feels it as he works isa person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who is bound to have some characteristics of quality.“(Robert is drawing a correlation between the act of caring and the essence of quality that exists in any and every given thing)

60. “The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the pre-intellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.“ 

61. “Personal transcendence of conflicts with technology don’t have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sew king a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems are the same. In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and then an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both in ability to see what “looks good“ and inability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that “good“. Both classic and romantic understandings of quality must be combined.“(This is essentially Mihaly’s flow theory)

62. “Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going… Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.”

63. “If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts.”

64. “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.”

65. “The drivers (commuters) seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are.”

66. “When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later and other path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45-degrees, and another path later at 90-degrees, you begin to understand that there’s some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if perhaps that isn’t the way you should go too.”

67. “We arrive at the turn off to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the national park-clean, tidy and preserved… At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with a small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, “don’t go too close!“ And see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of “well, there it is,“ just as the pictures show.… I have no resentment to all this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to you. You point to something as having quality and the quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye.”

68. “One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying with a much simpler shape of the shrub. There’s no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size.

69. “To go outside the mythos (the mythology and collected wisdom of human culture) is to become insane…”

70. “Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion.”

71. “… Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and then Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here (Primary America; cities, freeways, Hollywood spectaculars, media) it’s reversed.”

72. “There was nothing in his style to indicate that Aristotle was ever one to doubt Aristotle.”

73. “Walk into any of 100,000 classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles“ and study “methods“ and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries – the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.“ (Highlighting an ignorance of quality and fixation with reason)

74. “But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers became transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the immortal gods. It was also to be found within immortal principles, of which our current law of gravity has become one.

75. The immortal principal was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the immortal principal as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the immortal principle fire and introduced change as part of the principal. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a one and there is a many and the one is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the one as nous, meaning mind.

76. Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the immortal principle, the one, truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its affect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It’s here that the classic mind, for the first time, took a leave of its romantic origins and said, “the good and the true or not necessarily the same,” and goes it’s separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.

77. What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, “Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,“ and you have to say, “where were they? Point to them!” And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.“

78. “What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism is not a sense of duty as we understand it – duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate “virtue”, what is in Greek areté, “excellence.”

79. “A truly able person is always a threat.”

80. “Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people – what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.”