Quotes from Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
July 23, 2025 Literature Quotes
I recently read the book, “Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, by Robert Pirsig. It’s a beautiful book, though it has little to do with motorcycles. Here are some quotes full of ‘Quality’ — that which the book is really about. I highly recommend the book.
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
“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 like you’re losing time.”
“‘It was all those people in the cars coming the other way,’ she says. ‘The first one looked so sad. And then the next one looked exactly the same way, and then the next one and the next one, they were all the same.’ […] ‘It’s just that they looked so lost,’ she says. ‘Like they were all dead. Like a funeral procession.’”
“If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet”
“…there are human forces stronger than logic.”
“…if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”
“Chris kept asking questions that started to anger me because he didn’t see how serious it was. Finally I saw it was no use, gave it up, and my anger at him disappeared.”
“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”
“Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of 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. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. […] ‘Now, tell me a a ghost story.’ ‘I just did, out there.’ ‘I mean a real ghost story.’ ‘That was the realeast ghost story you’ll ever hear.’”
“Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it.”
“Hard to know what it is. No need to know.”
“As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”
“There’s nothing up ahead that’s any better than it is right here.”
“He just does it. Is with it.”
“That’s really why he got upset that day when he couldn’t get his engine started. It was an intrusion on his reality.”
“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”
“He was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife becasue that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself.”
“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. […] But what is less noticed in the arts - something is always created too.”
“One lives longer in order that he may live longer.”
“That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.”
“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.”
“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.”
“…and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.”
“There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
“A man conducting a gee-whiz science show […] is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be.”
“The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method.”
“It’s so big - that’s why I seem to wander sometimes.”
“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”
“It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.”
“It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.”
“The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.”
“He became aware that the doctrinal differences among 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.”
“The real University is not a material object. […] The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.”
“So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it’s capable of coming up with a solution.”
A rather long one, quoted in the book from the late Albert Einstein:
“In the temple of science are many mansions… and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside…If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers…those who have found favor with the angel…are somewhat odd, un-communicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.
What has brought them to the temple…no single answer will cover…escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”
And then, finally, the question the book answers, not by the words written, but by the Quality that originates from the words:
“What the hell is Quality? What is it?”