A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer’s backyard.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
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.
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
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.
That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.
To live for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.
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.
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
My favorite piece of technical writing: The assembly of a Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind.
I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.
You go up the mountaintop and all you’re gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.