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"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. Then when you're no longer thinking ahead each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself."
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"If you move faster than the music, it will look strange; if you move slower than the music, it will look strange! Be like autumn leaves which follow exactly the rhythm of the wind!"

"Without suffering, there's no happiness. So we shouldn't discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness."

"The absolute value of being neutral is zero."

"But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you'd get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right."

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."

"It's highly refined stuff-holding to one's purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig


"We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly."


"Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality."


"You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling."


"Now anybody can be 'kind.' And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class."


"Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?'If you take care of it.'What do you have to do?'Lot's of things. You've been watching me.'Will you show me all of them?'Sure.'Is it hard?'Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's 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 don't think that will be any problem at all."


"The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know."


"There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere."


"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."
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