The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty…
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.
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.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Now anybody can be “kind.” And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than on “time”….
People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.
I wake up wondering if I know we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.
Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. ‘Lila
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.
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Dad?””What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us.”What should I be when I grow up?”The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say.
To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.
What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that’s what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.
This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.
Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold
A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.
Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know.
The only Zen you 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.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life not the top.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
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.
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.
To live for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.