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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) (edit title/settings)

An Inquiry into Values

by Robert M. Pirsig (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Arguably one of the most profoundly important essays ever written on the nature and significance of "quality" and definitely a necessary anodyne to the consequences of a modern world pathologically obsessed with quantity. Although set as a story of a cross-country trip on a motorcycle... read more

Summary edit see section history

The book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on motorcycle from Minnesota to California by the author (though he is not identified in the book) and his son Chris. They are joined for the first nine days by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. The trip is punctuated by numerous... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

The book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on motorcycle from Minnesota to California by the author (though he is not identified in the book) and his son Chris. They are joined for the first nine days by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism, and the philosophy of science.

Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (after Plato's dialogue). Phaedrus, a teacher of creative and technical writing at a large university, became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "quality." His philosophical investigations eventually drove him insane, and he was subjected to electroshock treatment which permanently changed his personality.

Towards the end of the book, Phaedrus's personality begins to re-emerge and the narrator is reconciled with his past.

Characters/People edit see section history

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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. To see him you must see what he saw...”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Everything is different except one another, so we look around rather than talk, catching fragments of conversations among people who seem to know each other and are glancing at us because we're new.”
  • “The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Like those in the valley behind us, 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.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “The pencil is mightier than the pen.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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 between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good? Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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 everywhere.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man...”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “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.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • “In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you preceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. T”
    Robert M. Pirsig
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
    Highlighted by 551 Kindle customers
  • You are never dedicated to 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 kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
    Highlighted by 471 Kindle customers
  • The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
    Highlighted by 430 Kindle customers
  • The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.
    Highlighted by 407 Kindle customers
  • Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
    Highlighted by 393 Kindle customers
  • A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
    Highlighted by 367 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 337 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 325 Kindle customers
  • “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.
    Highlighted by 283 Kindle customers
  • The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
    Highlighted by 276 Kindle customers
Show all 46 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the leftgrip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 68 of 97 in Waterstone's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century. (authoritative list)
This is book 73 of 98 in Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: Reader's List. (authoritative list)
This book is in 100 Fantabulous Book Challenge. (community list)
This is book 97 of 95 in The Art of Manliness' Essential Man’s Library. (authoritative list)
This book is in TIME Magazine's All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This book is in Joel On Software Reading List. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Robert M. Pirsig (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Michael Kramer (Narrator)
  2. Knut Johansen (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Morrow
Country: USA
Publication Date: 1974
ISBN: 0688002307
Page Count: 412

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: CT275.P648 A3 1974
  • Dewey: 917.304920924

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Zen in the Art of Archery
  • Zen in the Art of Writing
  • Zen in the Martial Arts
  • Zen And The Art Of Faking It

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • Hardcore Zen
  • The Way of Zen
  • Zen Buddhism

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