Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is a philosophical work, wrapped in a story of a father and son travelling around the US. It concerns thoughts about quality, understanding things, and appreciation of the process itself. It also discusses quality in a philosophical setting.

🎨 Impressions

It was a dense book, and it took a while before I managed to finish it. but it was a good book to read. This book is known as an important book to read, but I might think I was not ready for it.

Maybe, and only maybe, I get to appreciate the quality of the process itself.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• If they can't stand physical discomfort and they can't stand technology, they've got a little compromising to do.

• As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can! Ach, du lieber!

• A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

• Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts…something is always created too.

• Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it -.He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience

• “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,”

• The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of “substance.” If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? If you try to imagine what this substance is, apart from what is sensed, you'll find yourself thinking about nothing whatsoever.

• She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say

• “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”

• What Phćdrus had been presented with by the faculty of the English department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma,which is Greek for “two premises,” has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull. If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.

• He remembered Locke's statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities.

• It's proper to begin with the regular facts, but after a rule is established beyond all doubt, the facts in conformity with it become dull because they no longer teach us anything new. Then it's the exception that becomes important. We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they're the most striking and also the most instructive.

• Zen Buddhists talk about “just sitting,” a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcyele maintenance is “just fixing,” in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness.

• When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he's doing.

• The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm.” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits?

• My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these don't work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from what's before you.

• Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned

• Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead's statement that all philosophy is nothing but “footnotes to Plato” can be well supported. The confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.