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.

scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.

That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind […] I’ve noticed that people who...

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. ‘Lila