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Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away. But that’s just the nature of memory. The events of our lives unfold
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“The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.”
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
“To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.”
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
“The most sinister thing about the fall of the Roman Empire was that the people who conquered it never understood that they had done so. They paralyzed the patterns of Roman social structure to a point where everybody just forgot what that structure was. Taxes became uncollectible. Armies composed of hired barbarians stopped receiving pay. Everything just lapsed. The patterns of civilization were forgotten, and a Dark Age settled in.”
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
“...that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig’s point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn’t make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.”
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
“Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There's nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There's no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn't an 'object' of observation. It's an alteration of observation itself. There's no such thing as a 'disease' of patterns of intellect. There's only heresy. And that's what insanity really is.”
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
― Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
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