Quotes About Understanding

I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too "scientific". Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.

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.

The answer doesn't seem to satisfy him. But he can't seem to say what's wrong with it.

He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that's not there.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

He was insane. And 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.

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.

The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological 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.

Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge.

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig's point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn't make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.

It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from.

Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are.

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. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something. "All

He isn't so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.

Since the world obviously doesn't function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.

John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. 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. And when thinking about Sylvia's moods and feelings, I couldn't see her complaining.

Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.