Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

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.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

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.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

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.

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.

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.

The Buddha resides 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.

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

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.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient Geometry is not true it is advantageous.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

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.

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 centre of it all.

If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

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.

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, Go away, I'm looking for the truth, and so it goes away. Puzzling.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.