Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I saw someone recommend this book on a LinkedIn post in 2019 which asked for recommendations of non-business books.

I bought my first copy then when we were in California and bought a replacement copy this year for my husband to read - and for me to read again - a book worth buying on multiple continents, I suppose.

What is the book about?

It’s a fictionalized autobiography of a man and his son on a cross country road trip by motorcycle. It’s a book heavily rooted in philosophy and though it takes place at various locations across their big trip west, it mostly takes place in the narrator’s own mind.

Who is this book for?

The full title is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

In short, I would say it is for the pensive and the philosophical.

It’s long and winding and quite dense at some points - to the extent I sometimes reread paragraphs for comprehension and sometimes read only one knowing a second time might not even help.

That said, I noted down quotes / passages I liked on 51 of the 392 pages - which is a pretty strong indicator of interest for me.

So, maybe this book was for me.

What did I like?

Here is the part of the story (my story) where I go back through all 51 passages I noted down, type them out, think about them, prioritize and edit the list, so that maybe some of you actually make it to the end.

pg 4 “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with an emphasis on ‘good’ rather than ‘time’ and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

pg 5 “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

pg 7 “We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.”

pg 7 “ ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question, ‘What’s best?’, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.”

pg 29 “‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘No’, I say.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they are unscientific.’
The way I say this makes John smile. ‘They dontain no matter,’ I continue, ‘and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.’
…’Of course,’ I add, ‘the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science.’”

pg 33 “Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands of ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

pg 66 “What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but it’s usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.”

pg 72 “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

pg 92 “Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is the potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s ‘potential’? That’s also in someone’s mind. Ghosts.”

pg 105 “Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.”

pg 151 “It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”

pg 153 “‘It’s an unconventional concept, I say, ‘but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. 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 has changed.n The test of your machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.’”

pg 155 “When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard to not inflict it on innocent people.”

pg 156 “Well it isn’t just art and technology. It’s kind of a non-coalesce between reason and feeling. What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hate for that. People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.”

pg 157 “You look back at the last 3000 years and with hindsight you think you see neat patterns and chains of cause and effect that have made things the way they are. But if you go back to original sources,, the literature of any particular era, you find that these causes were never apparent at the time they were supposed to be operating. During periods of root expansion, things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of the new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.”

pg 170 “Another things that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric...This was the old slap on the fingers if your modifiers were caught dangling stuff. Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egoistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies.”

pg 182 “The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy that everyone is happier not to expose.”

pg 195 “ He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques.”

pg 232 “The past exists only in our memories, and the future only in our plans.”

pg 293 “If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts…The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It’s dualistically called a “discovery” because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone’s awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.”

pg 307 “You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a reference painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and paint it naturally, That’s the way the experts do it. The making of a painting or fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.”

pg 360 “We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.”

pg 394 “Writing it seemed to have more quality than not writing it.”