The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

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

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

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

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

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.

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.

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

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

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

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

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

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?

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

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.

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....

The more you read, the more you calm down.

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.

Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.

The more you look, the more you see.

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.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

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.

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.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.

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 characteristics of Quality