An inquiry into values, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (ZAMM) is a fictionalized autobiography written by Robert M. Pirsig.The book is a 17-day narrative of a transcontinental journey that Pirsig made on his 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle from Minnesota to Northern California along with his son Chris. One of the biggest-selling philosophy books ever, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ is an interspersed account of the trip with philosophical discourses that he calls Chautauquas.In this book, the author tries to offer generations a solution to their anxieties through his own personal and philosophical experiences. His broken relationship with his own son and the art of motorcycle maintenance highlights a powerful self-reckoning process that reconciles science, religion, and humanism. Misting away the confusions of life and existence, this classic is a powerful examination of how we live and self-improvisations that we can bring about to live better. This is a ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ summary.So, if you too are struggling with the life’s good, bad and everything in between, here are some ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quotes to keep you inspired and philosophical at the same time. We have in this list quotes from ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ movie, discussion of ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ themes, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quotes by chapter, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ philosophy, looking for the truth quotes, real understanding quotes, truth knocks quotes, Robert Pirsig quotes, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quality quotes, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ book quotes, motorcycle philosophy book quotes, and the sun is going to rise tomorrow quotes.You may also check out quotes from the Book Thief and Kurt Vonnegut quotes Quotes About Self-AcceptanceWe have ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ explained in the introduction. We’re all good, in our own sweet ways. At various instances, throughout the book, Pirsig highlights that there’s good in each one of us. To live happily and to grow towards being a better person, we first need to accept ourselves and love the way we are. This will help us reach inner balance. Here are quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 1. “Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it.” 2. ″We just have to keep going until we find out what’s wrong or find out why we don’t know what’s wrong.” 3. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.” 4. “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.” 5. “whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.” 6. “If the machine produces tranquility, it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.” 7. “When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing.” 8. “You never gain something but that you lose something.”Quotes About FreedomFreedom is our fundamental right. But are we all really free? Robert M. Pirsig has rather a simple answer toward it. He says, to be really free, we first need to establish an inner calm, something that would require a lot of self-introspection. Here are our favorite quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 9. “The more you look, the more you see.” 10. “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.” 11. “The more you read, the more you calm down.” 12. “To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.” 13. “Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.”Inspirational QuotesRobert M. Pirsig uses motorcycle repair to describe his concept of zen. When done right, it fosters attunement and commitment to quality – a process that’s rewarding and satisfying. However, if your actions are driven by ego, you’ll end up meeting failure for sure. Here are some inspirational quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 14. “The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.” 15. “Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.” 16. “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.” 17. “One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.” 18. “Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.” 19. “The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.” 20. “Is it hard?? Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes that’s hard.” 21. “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.” 22. “There are as many routes as there are individual souls.” 23. “It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.” 24. “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.” 25. “In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.” 26. “Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness” is the real reason you find it hard to get started.” 27. “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. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something. 28. “To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land.” 29. “One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade” 30. “An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.” 31. “After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.”Quotes About ValuesBy narrating his own life experiences in his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig shows us how we must always attend to our own quirky mechanical needs, whether that’s with technology or within ourselves. This will help us become self-reliant and independent. So, take the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance route to improve your values and life. Here are quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 32. “The pencil is mightier than the pen.” 33. “We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.” 34. “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.” 35. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.” 36. “If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.” 37. “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.” 38. “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.” 39. “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test.” 40. “I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles” 41. “One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.” 42. “Do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good.” 43. “I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.” 44. “Grades really cover up failure to teach.”Quotes About QualityAt the heart of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ is Phaedrus’s quest to understand “Quality” – an overarching entity that divide the world into separate categories of science, art, and religion. Here are some of the ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quotes by Robert M. Pirsig that can help you improve your quality of life. 45. “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.” 46. “Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.” 47. “Quality tends to fan out like waves.” 48. “Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.” 49. “How do you know what it [Quality] is, or how do you know … it even exists?” 50. “A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.” 51. “If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.” 52. “My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.” 53. “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process.” 54. “Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.”Quotes About ReligionZAMM teaches you that life is a journey, not a destination. We’re often taught that doubt is a bad thing. But Pirsig suggests that we must doubt as it helps us become strong and resilient. Without doubt, there’s no way to prove our faith and dedication in something. Here are quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 55. “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.” 56. “Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is.” 57. “When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” 58. “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 the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.” 59. “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.” 60. “The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.” 61. “He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too.” 62. “From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.”Quotes About Self-EmpowermentThrough his real-life experiences of repairing his motorcycle, Robert M. Pirsig explains how fixing a motorcycle isn’t different from real experience. For real improvements, you need to repair all broken aspects of your life. Here are quotes by Robert M. Pirsig. 63. “The machine … out there and the person … in here are not two separate things.” 64. “Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it.” 65. “We just have to keep going until we find out what’s wrong or find out why we don’t know what’s wrong.” 66. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.” 67. “What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.” 68. “Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.” 69. “The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.” 70. “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.” 71. “People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.” 72. “On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.” 73. “Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.” 74. “I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.” 75. “Zen is the “spirit of the valley,” not the mountaintop.”Quotes About TruthFinding truth is hard, but not impossible. It could be buried under thousands of layers of mendacities. But with right attitude and positivity toward life, we can find our reality and bring a drastic change in the way we lead our life. Some of our favorite Phaedrus ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quotes by Robert M. Pirsig are here. 76. “The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.” 77. “For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.” 78. “Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.” 79. “We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.” 80. “This forest silence improves anyone.” 81. “The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” 82. “What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth.” 83. “The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself,”Quotes About RealityFor Pirsig, outlook plays a huge role in improving one’s standard of living. You just not need to solve the problem, but reaching out to the lying cause of the problem is also imperative, with right attitude and focus. He wants everyone to have positive attitude in life and look at everything, good or bad, with a changed perspective. 84. “Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 85. “Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 86. “Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 87. “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”― Robert M. Pirsig. 88. “That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 89. “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.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 90. “Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 91. “I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 92. “When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 93. “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."― Robert M. Pirsig. 94. “When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 95. “People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 96. “Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 97. “It, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 98. “It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 99. “The world has no existence whatsoever outside of the human imagination.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 100. “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 101. “An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.”― Robert M. Pirsig. 102. “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”— Robert M. Pirsig.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ quotes, then why not take a look at Tennessee Williams quotes or Yukio Mishima quotes.
An inquiry into values, ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (ZAMM) is a fictionalized autobiography written by Robert M. Pirsig.
