91 quotes
I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The Professor of Philosophy has made a mistake.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The Quality, the aretê he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word ‘quality’ cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Many of the older Sophists were selected as "ambassadors" of their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Dialectic generally means "of the nature of the dialogue," which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
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.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma!
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
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.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)