The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes...

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he’s got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I’ll have to wait a second though. He’s got to close a deal out...

I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try...

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.

This forest silence improves anyone.

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical...

The title of this Chautauqua is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” not “Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing,” and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion...

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.