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Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quotes of Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
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  1. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
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  2. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    duller than ditchwater. Yah
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  3. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness.
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  4. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.
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  5. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation. Phaedrus asked how. The student said they would post police to prevent it. Phaedrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about. That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast
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  6. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
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  7. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book like this.
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  8. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness
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  9. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    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.
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  10. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all. That was what it was about that wall in Korea. It was a material reflection of a spiritual reality.
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  11. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic, Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric, Aristotelian laughter…ha-ha, ha-ha. And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states-buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done….
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  12. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style.
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