91 quotes
"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)
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)
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)
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)
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions are not real questions at all—they are just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians fall into.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
All this is just an analogy.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)