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"But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, 'I am a mechanic.' At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job."
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"Just because you have a past with someone, doesn't mean you should have a future with them."
"The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians."
"Like sin itself, Satan appeals to the senses. He originated and perfected the art of disguising evil as good."
"Let go of rousing speechand identification with thoughtsUntil your endyou will never be jaded."
"Sometimes stepping away from what you desire the most, is the best action to take: because it gives the process the momentum to take its own course."
"I care as much as I can, but I don't spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve."
"I don't need to look at your primal, white-hot, mutant pirate eyes, big guy. Just forget that I'm there, and I'll try to block out the fact that I ever met you. Basically we'll just act like we do every day."
"Don't participate or allow yourself to be dragged into other people's dramas, complaints, or gossip."
"Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"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."
"The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself."
"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."
"Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's."
"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."
"To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top."
"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."
"My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest."
"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."
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