Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When I'm asked what is my favorite book, I often pause for a moment and reply, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” My reply always gets a laugh. Some people have heard of the book, and some have even tried reading it, but no one I've mentioned it to has expressed a similar level of admiration for it, and no one I've recommended it to has ever read it through to completion.

It's obviously not a book for everyone.

Why do I love it so much? Pirsig was trying to teach writing on a college level, and he struggled with traditional ways of teaching. One day the casual remark of an associate at the college—“I hope you are teaching Quality to your students”—sets off a train of thought that leads Pirsig to try some innovative methods of teaching in his classroom and eventually helps Pirsig form some new connections between two old systems of thought.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

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

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

“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. ”

“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.”

‘You've got to live right, too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in 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.'