Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) was an American author and professor. Pirsig was best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a contemporary philosophical meditation on how to live.
CLEAR ALL
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
3
Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
Respect the fact that all you do and are now has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose.
1
People’s sense of self-worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.
4
When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.
2
Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
7
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.