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

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

Familiarity can blind too.

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.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

There's no such thing as morality.

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

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.

Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.

Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die.

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.

Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.

Data without generalization is just gossip.

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

So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

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.