Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.

All the time we are aware of millions of things around us—these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road—aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we ar

Familiarity can blind you too.

His lack of harshness puzzled the students at first, then made them suspicious. Some began to ask sarcastic questions. These received soft answers and the lectures and speeches proceeded as usual, except with no grades.

But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning.

your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once.

if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.

When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.