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.

Grades really cover up failure to teach.

Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian.

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.

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.

When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.

You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

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.

Do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good.

Whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.

That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

The stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.

It’s important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally…mind control….

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.