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"Even in the presence of others he was completely alone."
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"I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already."
"At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul."
"Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion."
"Every now and then, I'd meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I'd stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn't understand it. I still don't. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone."
"I stayed in the town until earlyevening, and when the sun began to sink, my heart did too. This is your last chance to goback, I told myself. Once it gets completely dark, you might never be able to leave here. Iwent home on the same buses that had brought me there. I arrived before seven, and no onenoticed that I had run away."
"I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself."
"Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are everyone," I thought"and pondered."
"I have found no other cure for loneliness than to befriend it."
"Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing."
"I seek the city because there is nothing sweeter than not being alone in your loneliness."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"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."
"To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions."
"If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there's no logical basis for substance then there's no logical basis for concluding that what's produced these two views is the same motorcycle."
"He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force..."
"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's 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."
"Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold."
"He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time."
"The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself."
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on 'good' rather than on 'time'...."
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