"People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice."

"You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart."

"People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists."

"It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."

"Even in the presence of others he was completely alone."

"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."

"Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself."

"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."

"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."

"Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food."

"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."

"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."

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

"Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people-what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all."

"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."

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions."

"The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University."

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

"We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do."

"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."

"Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind."

"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."

"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."

"The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon."

"Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity."

"The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are."

"Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever."

"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."

"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."

"To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top."

"I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air."

"During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason."

"When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do."

"The TV scientist who mutters sadly, 'The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,' is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another."

"But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -- religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals -- they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same."

"A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, 'If you don't whip me, I won't work. He didn't get whipped. He didn't work."

"Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it's really learning. The questions, What's being taught? What's the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion."

"The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do."

"In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty..."

"Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?"

"Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come."

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling."

"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."

"Dad?'What?' A small bird rises from a tree in front of us.'What should I be when I grow up?'The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. 'Honest,' I finally say."

"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."