Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Actually Ive never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer-slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanics techniques, but you know in the end youre going to get it. Theres no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When youve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, Okay, Nature, thats the end of the nice guy, and you crank up the formal scientific method.

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think its some kind of knack or some kind of affinity for machines in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a short between the earphones, failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isnt any other test. If the machine produces tranquility its right. If it disturbs you its wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, thats what it is. Blind alley, though. If someones ungrateful and you tell him hes ungrateful, okay, youve called him a name. You havent solved anything.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

grades really cover up failure to teach.

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?If you take care of it.What do you have to do?Lots of things. Youve been watching me.Will you show me all of them?Sure.Is it hard?Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.Oh.After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, Dad?What?Will I have the right attitudes?I think so, I say. I dont think that will be any problem at all.

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that’s what makes it hard to see.

But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. 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. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that theres no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

The title of this Chautauqua is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing, and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the spirit of the valley, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you fin on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

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.

You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. 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 avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle youre working in 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 Qaulity or fall away from Qaulity together.

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it its getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones 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.

You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but theyre changing all the time and the changes arent always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.

When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.