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 looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.
("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values")
More Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig:
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.Robert M. Pirsig
What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent fabulously more coherent when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world.... ... but showing that, of course, was a very big job.
Robert M. Pirsig
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it 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.
Robert M. Pirsig
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Robert M. Pirsig
What follows is based on actual occurences. However,it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual about motorcycles,either.
Robert M. Pirsig
There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.
Robert M. Pirsig
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