Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Caution: it does contains a spoiler. Nice word caution.

... and this is the spoiler: I saw it coming since the travel woman buddy (Sylvia) was saying that made her sad seeing the sadness on the faces of travelers, people going to work.
But I immediately thought that you are sad with what you do if you have no passion for that, no appetence for it. And that sucks. :)

Besides that the book brought back memories, I did finished philosophy myself and of course I used to read stuff and was also mesmerized by the flow of Kant's critique.
I liked logic, I become a programmer, but I was always also attracted towards what in the book is called the romantic way :) Still relatively recently I discovered that life worth's living if you have passion for it, for the activities and people in it. Well not quite true, recently in terms of a long life I adopted it. So anyway this book came right on time for me and besides the message it is mostly enjoyable to read. I don't know that if you are not familiar at all with some of the thinking systems presented how easy is to follow though... And then maybe is also a bit to much explained, could have been shorter, to the point, but that is my own opinion.

Regarding the Quality metaphysics I donno like with all of them it is a bit weird for me to connect the reality with it, meaning concepts that make possible existence...
Only validity that I can see and agree is that quality is in the act of doing something if the person is passionate about it and then also the result of a quality work can or can not have quality.

He is saying: “The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. “

Maybe I do not understand it but the thought of quality existing before anything I cannot perceive.

Also I think that even if we do perceive something as possessing quality even if we do not quite can explain it and quantify it I can say that in different cultures the perception would not ...happened.

I donno, as I said the good thing about the book for me was that I enjoyed the cycles trip and the mood of the book and also the idea that people should actually open their eyes and do what they are passionate about it in life but also activities that maybe not fit well with their style (romantic or classic :D) should not be perceived as such because done with distaste will only lead to sloppy stuff and moods ;)

Part IV was decent, and the motorcycle trip portions were also ok, but overall I felt it took too long to build. The afterword was my favorite part.

I wouldn't read it again.

So boring, that I couldn't force myself to read more than 10% of it.

I liked it - so shoot me. This book succeeds not becuase of the answers it provides but because of the thought-provoking questions it raises.

Although Pirsag, like most of us mere mortals, is not a philosophy scholar, this book provides interesting (and novel) attempts to address questions with which deep thinkers have wrestled since antiquity.

I enjoyed the novel approach he takes in his valiant attempt unify the influences of “rational” thought and the “romantic” feelings on truth. Unfortunately, I am not sure I would apply the label “quality” to product of this unification.

I probably enjoyed this book because I have always found philosophical/ethical frameworks that are based on more than rationality to be most compelling - one of my favorite quote on this topic is from Hume “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions!”

For a more detailed description of Hume's views see “David Hume on Reason, Passions and Morals”

Believe me when I say: This book will change your life.

It can get challenging at times, but in the end, it's an amazing, amazing book. You will have at least questioned the basic and yet important tenets of intelligence, morality, and what it means to be good or bad and what it means to live, to really live, by the time you're done.

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was sixteen...it changed the way I thought about the world and about ideas. I don't think i've ever read anything quite like it.

There are some that argue that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is ‘mental masturbation' of sorts; or a ‘pretentious philosophical work' whose ideas are just all over the place. The truth is, this book is probably one of those few who deserve the oft-thrown around appraisal, ‘this book will change your life' - because, at its heart, the book is about ideas and covers tremendous mental territory. It's a challenging read, but highly recommended.

I have finally decided I don't need to finish this one. It's intriguing, but when I read self-indulgent memoir ramblings I prefer to read them by women. It's so dated too. If it were a contemporary blog I would totally read it. Also after picking it up, I read somewhere that it had nothing to do with Zen Buddhism. And I don't care about motorcycles or mechanics. That would put me definitively into one of Pirsig's categories of people, I think. The problematic kind. So now I'm done.

This took me over a year to read. Can't recommend it, to much philosophy and too little story.

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.'