Seán-Paul’s Reviews > Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values > Status Update

“The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine.” - p. 315

“How then choose the interesting fact, the one that begins again and again? Method is precisely this choice of facts; it is needful then to be occupied first with creating a method; and many have been imagined, since none imposes itself.” - p. 265

“The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.” - p. 247

“When you are trained to despise ‘just what you like’ then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others-a good slave. When you learn not to do ‘just what you like’ then the System loves you.” - pp. 232-233

“In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.” - p. 211

“What the hell is Quality? What is it?” - p. 184

“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 tomor-row. 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.” - p. 152

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.” - p. 103

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process… But what is less noticed in the arts-something is al.ways created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.” - pp. 83 - 84

“But some things you don't see be. cause they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.” - p. 60