If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my...

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

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...

But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can’t by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the...

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure...

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.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down....

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways...

Berge sollte man mit möglichst wenig Anstrengung und ohne Ehrgeiz ersteigen. Unsere eigene Natur sollte das Tempo bestimmen. Wenn man unruhig wird, geht man schneller. Wenn man zu keuchen anfängt, geht man langsamer. Man steigt...

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so...

I’ve said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists is...

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.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

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....

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it’s getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the...

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...

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road… old buildings, old people on a front porch… strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago,...

When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I’m alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It’s nice to go...

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.

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

When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.

just what you like” then the System loves you.

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...

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than on “time”….

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

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean...

grades really cover up failure to teach.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.

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...

If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it’s some kind of “knack” or some kind of “affinity for machines” in operation. They are right, but...

I wake up wondering if I know we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

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...

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the...

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...

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under...

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn’t show directions and have the map mounted...

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.

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.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty…

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us –...

It was the ghost of rationality itself … This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is...

John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now...

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. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the...

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego...

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?””If you take care of it.””What do you have to do?””Lot’s of things. You’ve been watching me.””Will you show me all of them?””Sure.””Is it hard?””Not if...

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua…that’s the only name I can think of for it…like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are...

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.