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It's Better To Live With A Sad Truth Than With All The Happy Progress Talk You Get Up Here In The North.
-Robert M. Pirsig
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It's Better To Live

Robert M. Pirsig
...
It's Better To Live With A Sad Truth Than With All The Happy Progress Talk You Get Up Here In The North.

Understanding the Quote: "it's better to live with a sad truth than with all the..."

This quote by Robert M. Pirsig reflects deeply on the theme of progress. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Progress, Get Up, Sad Truth, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Robert M. Pirsig interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig is celebrated for insightful thoughts on progress and get up. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Progress
Get Up
Sad Truth
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An Egoless Acceptance Of Stuckness Is A Key To An Understanding Of All Quality.
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It's Normal At This Point For The Fear-anger Syndrome To Take Over And Make You Want To Hammer On That Side Plate With A Chisel, To Pound It Off With A Sledge If Necessary. You Think About It, And The More You Think About It The More You're Inclined To Take The Whole Machine To A High Bridge And Drop It Off. It's Just Outrageous That A Tiny Little Slot Of A Screw Can Defeat You So Totally.
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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.
Sorry
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Any Philosophic Explanation Of Quality Is Going To Be Both False And True Precisely Because It Is A Philosophic Explanation. The Process Of Philosophic Explanation Is An Analytic Process, A Process Of Breaking Something Down Into Subjects And Predicates. What I Mean (and Everybody Else Means) By The Word 'quality' Cannot Be Broken Down Into Subjects And Predicates. This Is Not Because Quality Is So Mysterious But Because Quality Is So Simple, Immediate And Direct.
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Religious Mysticism Is Intellectual Garbage. It’s A Vestige Of The Old Superstitious Dark Ages When Nobody Knew Anything...it Is One Of Those Delusions That Isn’t Called Insane Only Because There Are So Many People Involved.
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The Ultimate Test's Always Your Own Serenity. If You Don't Have This When You Start And Maintain It While You're Working You're Likely To Build Your Personal Problems Right Into The Machine Itself.
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The Good Was Not A Form Of Reality. It Was Reality Itself, Ever-changing, Ultimately Unknowable In Any Kind Of Fixed, Rigid Way.
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When You Want To Hurry Something, That Means You No Longer Care About It And Want To Get On To Other Things.
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Between The Subject And The Object Lies The Value.
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If You Don't Generalize You Don't Philosophize.
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We Want To Make Good Time, But For Us Now This Is Measured With The Emphasis On "good" Rather Than On "time".
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No One Is Fanatically Shouting That The Sun Is Going To Rise Tomorrow. They Know It's Going To Rise Tomorrow.
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It's Not The 'nice' Guy Who Brings About Real Social Change. 'nice' Guys Look Nice Because They're Conforming. It's The 'bad' Guys, Who Only Look Nice A Hundred Years Later, That Are The Real Dynamic Force In Social Evolution.
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Socrates Is Not Just Expounding Noble Ideas In A Vacuum. He Is In The Middle Of A War Between Those Who Think Truth Is Absolute And Those Who Think Truth Is Relative. He Is Fighting That War With Everything He Has.
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One Thing About Pioneers That You Don't Hear Mentioned Is That They Are Invariably, By Their Nature, Mess-makers. They Go Forging Ahead, Seeing Only Their Noble, Distant Goal, And Never Notice Any Of The Crud And Debris They Leave Behind Them.
Goal
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This Inner Peace Of Mind Occurs On Three Levels Of Understanding. Physical Quietness Seems The Easiest To Achieve, Although There Are Levels And Levels Of This Too, As Attested By The Ability Of Hindu Mystics To Live Buried Alive For Many Days. Mental Quietness, In Which One Has No Wandering Thoughts At All, Seems More Difficult, But Can Be Achieved. But Value Quietness, In Which One Has No Wandering Desires At All But Simply Performs The Acts Of His Life Without Desire, That Seems The Hardest.
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Science Probes; It Does Not Prove. Imagine Newton's Reaction To An Objector Of His Law Of Gravity Who Argued That He Could Not Establish A Universal Law Because He Had Not Observed Every Falling Apple, Much Less Proved The Law Of Gravity - There Might, After All, Be An Apple That Levitates! Why 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?
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Rules Of Order State That ... No Minority Has A Right To Block A Majority From Conducting The Legal Business Of The Organisation .... But No Majority Has A Right To Prevent A Minority From Peacefully Attempting To Become The Majority.
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Communism And Socialism, Programs For Intellectual Control Over Society ... Fascism, A Program For The Social Control Of Intellect.
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The Pencil Is Mightier Than The Pen.
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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.
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Cultures Are Not The Source Of All Morals, Only A Limited Set Of Morals. Cultures Can Be Graded And Judged Morally According To Their Contribution To The Evolution Of Life.
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What Is Essential To Understand At This Point Is That Until Now There Was No Such Thing As Mind And Matter, Subject And Object, Form And Substance. Those Divisions Are Just Dialectical Inventions That Came Later...they Are Just Ghosts, Immortal Gods Of The Modern Mythos Which Appear To Us To Be Real Because We Are Within That Mythos. But In Reality They Are Just As Much An Artistic Creation As The Anthropomorphic Gods They Replaced.
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You Want To Know How To Paint A Perfect Painting? It's Easy. Make Yourself Perfect And Then Just Paint Naturally.
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I Think Now The Trace Of Egotism May Have Been The Beginning Of All His Troubles
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It's Better To Live With A Sad Truth Than With All The Happy Progress Talk You Get Up Here In The North.
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The Only Zen Thoughts You Can Find On A Mountain Summit Are Those You Brought Yourself.
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To Speak Of Certain Government And Establishment Institutions As 'the System' Is To Speak Correctly . . . They Are Sustained By Structural Relationships Even When They Have Lost All Other Meaning And Purpose. People Arrive At A Factory And Perform A Totally Meaningless Task From Eight To Five Without Question Because The Structure Demands It Be That Way. There's No Villian, 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.
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I've Wondered Why It Took Us So Long To Catch On. We Saw It, And Yet We Didn't See It. Or Rather We Were Trained Not To See It. Conned Perhaps Into Thinking That The Real Action Was Metropolitan And All This Was Just Boring Hinterland. It Was 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.
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You Are Never Dedicated To Do Something You Have Complete Confidence In. No One Is Fanatically Shouting That The Sun Is Going To Rise Tomorrow. They Know It's Going To Rise Tomorrow. When People Are Fanatically Dedicated To Political Or Religious Faiths Or Any Other Kind Of Dogmas Or Goals, It's Always Because These Dogmas Or Goals Are In Doubt.
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From An Endless Beach Of Reality, We Take A Grain Of Sand And Call It The World.
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The Real Cycle You're Working On Is A Cycle Called Yourself.
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And What Is Good, Phaedrus, And What Is Not Good— Need We Ask Anyone To Tell Us These Things?
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I Argued That Physical Discomfort Is Important Only When The Mood Is Wrong. Then You Fasten On To Whatever Thing Is Uncomfortable And Call That The Cause. But If The Mood Is Right, Then Physical Discomfort Doesn't Mean Much.
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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.
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It's Paradoxical That Where People Are The Most Closely Crowded, In The Big Coastal Cities In The East And West, The Loneliness Is The Greatest... The Explanation, I Suppose, Is That The Physical Distance Between People Has Nothing To Do With Loneliness. It's Psychic Distance...
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The Past Exists Only In Our Memories, The Future Only In Our Plans. The Present Is Our Only Reality. The Tree That You Are Aware Of Intellectually, Because Of That Small Time Lag, Is Always In The Past And Therefore Is Always Unreal. Any Intellectually Conceived Object Is Always In The Past And Therefore Unreal. Reality Is Always The Moment Of Vision Before The Intellectualization Takes Place. There Is No Other Reality.
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Within A Metaphysics Of Quality, Science Is A Set Of Static Intellectual Patterns Describing This Reality, But The Patterns Are Not The Reality They Describe.
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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.
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Boredom Always Precedes A Period Of Great Creativity.
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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.
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Laws Of Nature Are Human Inventions, Like Ghosts. Laws Of Logic, Or Mathematics Are Also Human Inventions, Like Ghosts. The Whole Blessed Thing Is A Human Invention, Including The Idea That It Isn't A Human Invention.
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We Have Artists With No Scientific Knowledge And Scientists With No Artistic Knowledge And Both With No Spiritual Sense Of Gravity At All, And The Result Is Not Just Bad, It Is Ghastly.
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The Hippies Had In Mind Something That They Wanted, And Were Calling It Freedom, But In The Final Analysis Freedom Is A Purely Negative Goal. It Just Says Something Is Bad. Hippies Weren't Really Offering Any Alternatives Other Than Colorful Short-term Ones, And Some Of These Were Looking More And More Like Pure Degeneracy. Degeneracy Can Be Fun But It's Hard To Keep Up As A Serious Lifetime Occupation.
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You Have To Remember, That Insane People Can Do Some Horrors Themselves. I Had Committed No Crime, Though. I Hadn't Shot Anybody. Yet.
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"when Are We Going To Get Going?" Chris Says. "what's Your Hurry?" I Ask. "i Just Want To Get Going." "there's Nothing Up Ahead That's Any Better Than It Is Right Here."
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The Truth Knocks On The Door And You Say, Go Away, I'm Looking For The Truth, And It Goes Away. Puzzling.
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In A Car You're Always In A Compartment, And Because You're Used To It You Don't Realize That Through That Car Window Everything You See Is Just More Tv. You're A Passive Observer And It Is All Moving By You Boringly In A Frame. 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.
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Familiarity Can Blind Too.
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The Place To Improve The World Is First In One's Own Heart And Head And Hands.
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A Thing That Has No Value Does Not Exist.
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Quality... You Know What It Is, Yet You Don't Know What It Is.
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Any Effort That Has Self-glorification As Its Final Endpoint Is Bound To End In Disaster.
Failure
Self
Effort
A Person Isn't Considered Insane If There Are A Number Of People Who Believe The Same Way. Insanity Isn't Supposed To Be A Communicable Disease. If One Other Person Starts To Believe Him, Or Maybe Two Or Three, Then It's A Religion.
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People
The Idea That The Majority Of Students Attend A University For An Education Independent Of The Degree And Grades Is A Hypocrisy Everyone Is Happier Not To Expose. Occasionally Some Students Do Arrive For An Education But Rote And Mechanical Nature Of The Institution Soon Converts Them To A Less Idealic Attitude
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Mountains Should Be Climbed With As Little Effort As Possible And Without Desire. The Reality Of Your Own Nature Should Determine The Speed. If You Become Restless, Speed Up. If You Become Winded, Slow Down. You Climb The Mountain In An Equilibrium Between Restlessness And Exhaustion. Then, When You're No Longer Thinking Ahead, Each Footstep Isn't Just A Means To An End But A Unique Event In Itself. To Live Only For Some Future Goal Is Shallow. It's The Sides Of The Mountains Which Sustain Life, Not The Top.
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Now He Began To See For The First Time The Unbelievable Magnitude Of What Man, When He Gained Power To Understand And Rule The World In Terms Of Dialectic Truths, Had Lost. He Had Built Empires Of Scientific Capability To Manipulate The Phenomena Of Nature Into Enormous Manifestations Of His Own Dreams Of Power And Wealth...but For This He Had Exchanged An Empire Of Understanding Of Equal Magnitude: An Understanding Of What It Is To Be A Part Of The World, And Not An Enemy Of It.
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Is It Hard?' Not If You Have The Right Attitudes. Its Having The Right Attitudes Thats Hard.
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Today We Are Living In An Intellectual And Technological Paradise And A Moral And Social Nightmare Because The Intellectual Level Of Evolution, In Its Struggle To Become Free Of The Social Level, Has Ignored The Social Level's Role In Keeping The Biological Level Under Control.
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Good Is A Noun Rather Than An Adjective.
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Absence Of Quality Is The Essence Of Squareness.
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Absence
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Ocean
Night
Wind
The Best Students Always Are Flunking. Every Good Teacher Knows That.
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Students
Very Good
Dialectic, Which Is The Parent Of Logic, Came Itself From Rhetoric. Rhetoric Is In Turn The Child Of The Myths And Poetry Of Ancient Greece. That Is So Historically, And That Is So By Any Application Of Common Sense. The Poetry And Myths Are The Response Of A Prehistoric People To The Universe Around Them Made On The Basis Of Quality. It Is Quality, Not Dialectic, Which Is The Generator Of Everything We Know.
Children
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Common Sense
Substance Is A Subspecies Of Value. When You Reverse The Containment Process And Define Substance In Terms Of Value The Mystery Disappears: Substance Is A "stable Pattern Of Inorganic Values." The Problem Then Disappears. The World Of Objects And The World Of Values Is Unified.
Substance
World
Patterns
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.
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Wall
Night
When You've Got A Chautauqua In Your Head, It's Extremely Hard Not To Inflict It On Innocent People.
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Innocent
Hard
If Your Mind Is Truly, Profoundly Stuck, Then It Might Be Much Better Off Than When It Was Loaded With Ideas
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Mind
Might
Data Without Generalization Is Just Gossip.
Data
Gossip
Generalization
Coastal People Never Really Know What The Ocean Symbolizes To Landlocked Inland People--what A Great Distant Dream It Is, Present But Unseen In The Deepest Level Of Subconsciousness, And When They Arrive At The Ocean And The Conscious Images Are Compared With The Subconscious Dream There Is A Sense Of Defeat At Having Come So Far To Be Stopped By A Mystery That Can Never Be Fathomed. The Source Of It All.
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Ocean
People
Quality Is A Direct Experience Independent Of And Prior To Intellectual Abstractions.
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Independent
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... The Laws Of Physics And Of Logic ... The Number System ... The Principle Of Algebraic Substitution. These Are Ghosts. We Just Believe In Them So Thoroughly They Seem Real.
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Believe
Law
The Purpose Of Scientific Method Is To Select A Single Truth From Among Many Hypothetical Truths. That, More Than Anything Else, Is What Science Is All About. But Historically Science Has Done Exactly The Opposite. Through Multiplication Upon Multiplication Of Facts, Information, Theories And Hypotheses, It Is Science Itself That Is Leading Mankind From Single Absolute Truths To Multiple Indeterminate, Relative Ones.
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Purpose
Done
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.
Fun
May
Way
The Logic Of Science Was Infallible, And If The Scientists Were Sometimes Mistaken, This Was Assumed To Be Only From Their Mistaking Its Rules.
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Sometimes
Scientist
…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.
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Reality
Unless You're Fond Of Hollering You Don't Make Great Conversations On A Running Cycle. Instead You Spend Your Time Being Aware Of Things And Meditating On Them. On Sights And Sounds, On The Mood Of The Weather And Things Remembered, On The Machine And The Countryside You're In, Thinking About Things At Great Leisure And Length Without Being Hurried And Without Feeling You're Losing Time.
Running
Thinking
Sight
We Always Condemn Most In Others, He Thought, That Which We Most Fear In Ourselves.
Acceptance
Self Acceptance
I Really Don't Mind Dying Because I Figure I Haven't Wasted This Life.
Mind
Dying
Figures
For Every Fact There Is An Infinity Of Hypotheses.
Science
Facts
Infinity
One Geometry Cannot Be More True Than Another; It Can Only Be More Convenient. Geometry Is Not True, It Is Advantageous.
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Convenient
They Just Hate It When People Make Love. And Then They'll Go To A Fistfight Where Somebody's Really Hurt And All Covered With Bloodand They'll Just Love That. Or A War And Stuff Like That. They're All Mixed Up And They're Trying To Take It Out On You So You Get Mixed Up Too.
Hurt
Hate
War
Stuckness Shouldn't Be Avoided. It's The Psychic Predecessor Of All Real Understanding. An Egoless Acceptance Of Stuckness Is A Key To An Understanding Of All Quality, In Mechanical Work As In Other Endeavors.
Real
Acceptance
Keys
The Kid Who Is Scared Is The One The Bullies Go After. I Used To Get Beat Up Pretty Badly.
Kids
Bully
Scared
Even Though Quality Cannot Be Defined, You Know What Quality Is.
Quality
Knows
Defined
The Past Exists Only In Our Memories, The Future Only In Our Plans. The Present Is Our Only Reality.
Inspirational
Memories
Future
One Could Almost Define Life As The Organized Disobedience Of The Law Of Gravity. One Could Show That The Degree To Which An Organism Disobeys This Law Is A Measure Of Its Degree Of Evolution.
Life
Law
Degrees
Cliches And Stereotypes Such As "beatnik" Or "hippie" Have Been Invented For The Antitechnologists, The Antisystem People, And Will Continue To Be. But One Does Not Convert Individuals Into Mass People With The Simple Coining Of A Mass Term.
Hippie
Simple
People
The Only Zen You Can Find On The Tops Of Mountains Is The Zen You Bring Up There.
Encouraging
Wisdom
Hiking
The Birth Of A New Fact Is Always A Wonderful Thing To Experience. It's Dualistically Called A "discovery" Because Of The Presumption That It Has An Existence Independent Of Anyone's Awareness Of It. When It Comes Along, It Always Has, At First, A Low Value. Then, Depending On The Value-looseness Of The Observer And The Potential Quality Of The Fact, Its Value Increases, Either Slowly Or Rapidly, Or The Value Wanes And The Fact Disappears.
Independent
Discovery
Quality
Care And Quality Are Internal And External Aspects Of The Same Thing. A Person Who Sees Quality And Feels It As He Works Is A Person Who Cares. A Person Who Cares About What He Sees And Does Is A Person Who’s Bound To Have Some Characteristic Of Quality.
Quality
Who Cares
Doe
Metaphysics Is A Restaurant Where They Give You A Thirty Thousand Page Menu, And No Food.
Giving
Atheism
Pages
Objects Are Inorganic And Biological Values; Subjects Are Social And Intellectual Values.
Intellectual
Social
Subjects
Man Is Not The Source Of All Things, As The Subjective Idealists Would Say. Nor Is He The Passive Observer Of All Things, As The Objective Idealists Would Say. The Quality Which Creates The World Emerges As A Relationship Between Man And His Experience. He Is A Participant In The Creation Of All Things. The Measure Of All Things.
Men
Unity
Quality
What's New?" Is An Interesting And Broadening Eternal Question, But One Which, If Pursued Exclusively, Results Only In An Endless Parade Of Trivia And Fashion, The Silt Of Tomorrow.
Fashion
Interesting
Trivia
To Live Only For Some Future Goal Is Shallow. It's The Sides Of The Mountain That Sustain Life, Not The Top.
Life
Wisdom
Future
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.
Lying
Knows
Ifs
A Motorcycle Functions Entirely In Accordance With The Laws Of Reason, And A Study Of The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance Is Really A Miniature Study Of The Art Of Rationality Itself.
Art
Law
Motorcycle
It's Nice To Start Journeys Pleasantly, Even When You Know They Won't End That Way.
Nice
Journey
Way
Stuckness Shouldn't Be Avoided. It's The Physic Predecessor Of All Real Understanding.
Real
Understanding
Avoided
It Is Always Good Policy To Tell The Truth Unless Of Course You Are An Exceptionally Good Liar. Jerome K. Jerome 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.
Truth
Liars
Doors
Physical Distance Between People Has Nothing To Do With Loneliness. It's Psychic Distance.
Distance
Loneliness
Psychics
How Are You Going To Teach Virtue If You Teach The Relativity Of All Ethical Ideas? Virtue, If It Implies Anything At All, Implies An Ethical Absolute. A Person Whose Idea Of What Is Proper Varies From Day To Day Can Be Admired For His Broadmindedness, But Not For His Virtue.
Ideas
Ethics
Virtue
Morality Is Not A Simple Set Of Rules. It's A Very Complex Struggle Of Conflicting Patterns Of Values. This Conflict Is The Residue Of Evolution. As New Patters Evolve They Come Into Conflict With Old Ones. Each Stage Of Evolution Creates In Its Wake A Wash Of Problems.
Struggle
Simple
Patterns
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.
Looks
Patterns
Where You Are
Definitions Are The Foundation Of Reason. You Can't Reason Without Them.
Foundation
Definitions
Reason
It's So Hard When Contemplated In Advance, And So Easy When You Do It.
Easy
Contemplating
Hard
Quality Isn't A Thing. It Is An Event.
Quality
Events
Now The Stream Of Our Common Consciousness Seems To Be Obliterating Its Own Banks, Losing Its Central Direction And Purpose, Flooding The Lowlands, Disconnecting And Isolating The Highlands And To No Particular Purpose Other Than The Wasteful Fulfillment Of Its Own Internal Momentum
Momentum
Purpose
Losing
The More You Look, The More You See.
Looks
Zen Motorcycle Maintenance
The Intelligence Of The Mind Can't Think Of Any Reason To Live, But It Goes On Anyway Because The Intelligence Of The Cells Can't Think Of Any Reason To Die.
Thinking
Cells
Mind
Cultivate Peace Of Mind Which Does Not Separate One's Self From One's Surroundings. When That Is Done Successfully, Then Everything Else Follows Naturally.
Self
Inner Peace
Mind
Making An Art Out Of Your Technological Life Is The Way To Solve The Problem Of Technology...art Is Anything That You Can Do Well. Anything That You Can Do With Quality.
Art
Creativity
Technology
There's So Much Talk About The System. And So Little Understanding.
Understanding
Littles
Zen Motorcycle Maintenance
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.
Nature
Real
Thinking
Even In The Presence Of Others He Was Completely Alone.
Loneliness
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.
Reflection
Serenity
Mind
Any Person Of Any Philosophic Persuasion Who Sits On A Hot Stove Will Verify Without Any Intellectual Argument Whatsoever That He Is In An Undeniably Low-quality Situation: That The Value Of His Predicament Is Negative. This Low Quality Is Not Just A Vague, Woolly-headed, Crypto-religious, Metaphysical Abstraction. It Is An Experience. It Is Not A Judgment About An Experience. It Is Not A Description Of Experience. The Value Itself Is An Experience. As Such It Is Completely Predictable. It Is Verifiable By Anyone Who Cares To Do So.
Religious
Intellectual
Quality
The Number Of Hypotheses Available To Explain Any Given Phenomenon Is Infinite.
Numbers
Infinite
Given
Logic Presumes A Separation Of Subject From Object; Therefore Logic Is Not Final Wisdom.this Is Zen. This Is My Motorcycle Maintenance.
Motorcycle
Finals
Maintenance
There Is A Perennial Classical Question That Asks Which Part Of The Motorcycle, Which Grain Of Sand In Which Pile, Is The Buddha. Obviously To Ask That Question Is To Look In The Wrong Direction, For The Buddha Is Everywhere. But Just As Obviously To Ask The Question Is To Look In The Right Direction, For The Buddha Is Everwhere.
Motorcycle
Looks
Sand
The Only Difference Between Causation And The Value Is That The Word "cause" Implies Absolute Certainty Whereas The Implied Meaning Of "value" Is One Of Preference. In Classical Science It Was Supposed That The World Always Works In Terms Of Absolute Certainty And That "cause" Is The More Appropriate Word To Describe It. But In Modern Quantum Physics All That Is Changed. Particles "prefer" To Do What They Do. An Individual Particle Is Not Absolutely Committed To One Predictable Behavior. What Appears To Be An Absolute Cause Is Just A Very Consistent Pattern Of Preferences.
Differences
World
Patterns
Civilization, Or "the System" Or "society" Or Whatever You Want To Call It, Is Best Served Not By Mules But By Free Men.
Men
Civilization
Want
If Someone's Ungrateful And You Tell Him He's Ungrateful, Okay, You've Called Him A Name. You Haven't Solved Anything.
Names
Ungrateful
Okay
(what Makes His World So Hard To See Clearly Is Not Its Strangeness But Its Usualness).familiarity Can Blind You Too.
World
Blind
Strangeness
Sanity Is Not Truth. Sanity Is Conformity To What Is Socially Expected. Truth Is Sometimes In Conformity, Sometimes Not.
Truth
Health
Independence
To An Experienced Zen Buddhist, Asking If One Believes In Zen Or One Believes In The Buddha, Sounds A Little Ludicrous, Like Asking If One Believes In Air Or Water. Similarly Quality Is Not Something You Believe In, Quality Is Something You Experience.
Buddhist
Believe
Air
If There Were Only One Person In The World, Is There Any Way He Could Be Insane?
Insane
World
Way
Analytic And Romantic Understanding Should Be United At A Basic Level. Reassimilate The Passions From Which The Rational Mind Fled.
Passion
Understanding
Mind
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.
Data
Suffering
Tests
One Of The Most Moral Acts Is To Create A Space In Which Life Can Move Forward.
Moving
Moving Forward
Space
Mental Patterns Do Not Originate Out Of Inorganic Nature. They Originate Out Of Society, Which Originates Out Of Inorganic Nature. And, As Anthropologists Know So Well, What A Mind Thinks Is As Dominated By Biological Patterns As Social Patterns Are Dominated By Biological Patterns And As Biological Patterns Are Dominated By Inorganic Patterns. There Is No Direct Scientific Connection Between Mind And Matter. As The Atomic Scientist, Niels Bohr, Said, "we Are Suspended In Language." Our Intellectual Description Of Nature Is Always Culturally Derived.
Thinking
Mind
Intellectual
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.
Destiny
Thinking
People
Sometimes It's A Little Better To Travel Than To Arrive
Inspirational
Travel
Littles
My Favorite Piece Of Technical Writing: Assembly Of Japanese Bicycle Require Great Peace Of Mind.
Peace
Writing
Mind
Of Course, The Laws Of Science Contain No Matter And Have No Energy Either And Therefore Do Not Exist Except In People's Minds. It's Best To Be Completely Scientific About The Whole Thing And Refuse To Believe In Either Ghosts Or The Laws Of Science. That Way You're Safe. That Doesn't Leave You Very Much To Believe In, But That's Scientific Too.
Believe
Law
People
A Person Filled With Gumption Doesn’t Sit About Stewing About Things. He’s At The Front Of The Train Of His Own Awareness, Watching To See What’s Up The Track And Meeting It When It Comes. That’s Gumption. If You’re Going To Repair A Motorcycle, An Adequate Supply Of Gumption Is The First And Most Important Tool. If You Haven’t Got That You Might As Well Gather Up All The Other Tools And Put Them Away, Because They Won’t Do You Any Good.
Track
Motorcycle
Important
We Must Understand That When A Society Undermines Intellectual Freedom For Its Own Purposes It Is Absolutely Morally Bad, But When It Represses Biological Freedom For Its Own Purposes It Is Absolutely Morally Good.
Intellectual
Purpose
Intellectual Freedom
I Have Money, Fame, A Happy Wife, Our Daughter Nell.
Daughter
Mother
Wife
What's Wrong With Technology Is That It's Not Connected In Any Real Way With Matters Of The Spirit And Of The Heart. And So It Does Blind, Ugly Things Quite By Accident And Gets Hated For That.
Real
Heart
Technology
The Way To Solve The Conflict Between Human Values And Technology Needs Is Not To Run Away From Technology. That's Impossible. The Way To Resolve The Conflict Is To Break Down The Barriers Of Dualistic Thought That Prevent A Real Understanding Of What Technology Is--not An Exploitation Of Nature, But A Fusion Of Nature And The Human Spirit Into A New Kind Of Creation That Transcends Both.
Running
Real
Technology
The More You Read, The More You Calm Down.
Reading
Calm
Calm Down
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.
Struggle
Order
People
The Mythos-over-logos Argument Points To The Fact That Each Child Is Born As Ignorant As Any Caveman. What Keeps The World From Reverting To The Neandertal 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. To Feel That One Is Not So United, That One Can Accept Or Discard This Mythos As One Pleases, Is Not To Understand What The Mythos Is.
Art
Children
Men
I Have Been A Lifelong Democrat. Like All Ideas, Though, The Democrat Ideas Need To Be Dynamic. It Needs To Be Kept Current.
Ideas
Needs
Currents
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.
Mother
Baby
Arbitrary
That Which Destroys The Old Mythos Becomes The New Mythos.
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.
Depression
Reflection
Men
What I Mean (and Everybody Else Means) By The Word 'quality' Cannot Be Broken Down Into Subjects And Predicates. This Is Not Because Quality Is So Mysterious But Because Quality Is So Simple, Immediate And Direct.
Mean
Simple
Broken
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.
Eye
Soul
Skins
The Buddha Takes No Position On Gods, He Suggests They May Exist Or They May Not, But Either Way You Can Live A Moral Life.
May
Way
Moral
A Culture-bearing Book, Like A Mule, Bears The Culture On Its Back. No One Should Sit Down To Write One Deliberately. Culture-bearing Books Appear Almost Accidentally, Like A Sudden Surge In The Stock Market. There Are Books Of High Quality That Are A Part Of The Culture, But That Is Not The Same. They Are A Part Of It. They Aren't Carrying It Anywhere. They May Talk About Insanity Sympathetically, For Example, Because That's The Standard Cultural Attitude. But They Don't Carry Any Suggestion That Insanity Might Be Something Other Than Sickness Or Degeneracy.
Attitude
Book
Writing
The Major Producer Of The Social Chaos, The Indeterminacy Of Thought And Values That Rational Knowledge Is Supposed To Eliminate, Is None Other Than Science Itself.
Science
Chaos
Social
So Round And Round You Go, Spinning Mental Wheels And Nowhere Finding Anyplace To Get Traction. What The Hell...is It?
Spinning
Wheels
Hell
If You Are Following The Dharma No Matter What You Do It Is Moral.
Matter
Moral
Dharma
Caring About What You Are Doing Is Considered Either Unimportant Or Taken For Granted.
Taken
Caring
Granted
Quality Tends To Fan Out Like Waves.
Quality
Fans
Wave
The Solutions All Are Simple - After You Have Arrived At Them. But They're Simple Only When You Know Already What They Are.
Truth
Simple
Rationality
The Bones And Flesh And Legal Statistics Are The Garments Worn By The Personality, Not The Other Way Around.
Personality
Flesh
Statistics
The Real Ugliness Lies In The Relationship Between People Who Produce The Technology And The Things They Produce, Which Results In A Similar Relationship Between The People Who Use The Technology And The Things They Use.
Lying
Real
Technology
I Go On Living, More From Force Of Habit Than Anything Else.
Life
Goes On
Habit
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?
Struggle
Simple
Oxygen
Now, To Take That Which Has Caused Us To Create The World, And Include It Within The World We Have Created, Is Clearly Impossible. This Is Why Quality Cannot Be Defined. If We Do Define It, We Are Defining Something Less Than Quality Itself.
Quality
World
Defining
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.
Funny
Sports
Dog
Science Values Static Patterns.
Science
Patterns
Static
I Think This Fear Of Insanity Is Comparable To The Fear People Once Had Of Falling Off The Edge Of The World. Or The Fear Of Heretics...what's Happening Is That Each Year Our Old Flat Earth Of Conventional Reason Becomes Less And Less Adequate To Handle The Experiences We Have And This Is Creating Wide-spread Feelings Of Topsy-turviness. As A Result We're Getting More And More People In Irrational Areas Of Thought...occultism, Mysticism, Drug Changes And The Like...because They Feel An Inadequacy In Classical Reason To Handle What They Know Are Real Experiences.
Real
Fall
Thinking
The Real University... Has No Specific Location. It Owns No Property, Pays No Salaries, And Receives No Material Dues... 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.
Real
Mind
Salary
The Thing To Understand Is That If You Are Going To Reform Society You Don't Start With Cops. And If You Are Going To Reform Intellect You Don't Start With Psychiatrists. If You Don't Like Our Present Social System Or Intellectual System The Best Thing You Can Do With Either Cops Or Psychiatrists Is Stay Out Of Their Way. You Leave Them 'till Last.
Intellectual
Growth
Way
I Really Don't Mind Dying Because I Figure I Haven't Wasted This Life. 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.
Book
People
Mind
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