(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

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought

If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.

Oh, the laws of physics and of logic…the number system…the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.

Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.

What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man...

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information.

He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person.

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.

Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.

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.

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.