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"He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working."
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"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
"It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
"If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says."
"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."
"Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff."
"When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else."
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on 'good' rather than on 'time'...."
"The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around."
"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots."
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