Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.
It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.
The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
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?
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time".
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.