Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Last read May 16, 2021
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Highlights
34 highlights.
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Page: 25
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
Page: 25
The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination.
Page: 31
when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all.
Page: 71
One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
Page: 72
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.
Page: 88
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
Page: 88
That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.
Page: 92
The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.
Page: 93
A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be.
Page: 95
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested.
Page: 100
He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
Page: 106
From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself?
Page: 115
Hume’s answer is “None.” There’s no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it’s just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another.
Page: 115
“But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience.”
Page: 116
The a priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.
Page: 116
The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.
Page: 132
The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
Page: 132
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.
Page: 134
People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.
Page: 149
This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.
Page: 172
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.
Page: 175
education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on.
Page: 177
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
Page: 183
He remembered Locke’s statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. The “object” is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities.
Page: 208
Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Page: 215
People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.
Page: 224
Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.
Page: 257
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.
Page: 316
The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
Page: 318
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.
Page: 323
Dialectic generally means “of the nature of the dialogue,”
Page: 330
It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.
Page: 330
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.
Page: 353