Daniel Sanchez > Daniel's Quotes

“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.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“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.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The more you look, the more you see.”
― Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“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.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.”
― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

“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.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outwards from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.”
― Robert Pirsig

“Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A 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.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“My business was now continually augmenting, and my circumstances growing daily easier, my newspaper having become very profitable, as being for a time almost the only one in this and the neighbouring provinces. I experienced, too, the truth of the observation, "that after getting the first hundred pound, it is more easy to get the second," money itself being of a prolific nature.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin