Quotes About Perspective

Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop.

But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That's the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear

There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.

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.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. 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.

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.

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

At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew…and grew…and grew …until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be here.

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.

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.

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

My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.

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

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.

most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

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.

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong.

That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

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.