A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn’t shot anybody. Yet.
99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother’s face without having it defined. It’s just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down.
If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.
You’ve got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That’s my moral for the day.
I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman’s game, though that is changing.
People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself.
The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.
Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. 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.
It was the ghost of rationality itself... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.
One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.
My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It’s very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
This forest silence improves anyone.
People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.