Quality is the Buddha.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.
If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
