Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 40th Anniversary Edition

He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, not

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

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

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

‘When are we going to get going?’ Chris says. ‘What’s your hurry?’ I ask. ‘I just want to get going.’ ‘There’s nothing up ahead that’s any better than it is right here.’

Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing.