105 quotes
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)
Making... an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.
NPR Interview (1974)
The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech… Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that…
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)
Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned.
Lila (1991)
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)
"Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle's patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn't afford much satisfaction.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
A person who knows how to fix motorcycles—with Quality—is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
In recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture—two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Lila (1991)
We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.
Lila (1991)
Who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
There is a Swedish word, kulturbärer, which can be translated as "culture-bearer" but still doesn't mean much. It's not a concept that has much American use, although it should have.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Lila (1991)
Uncle Tom's Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)