“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 - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and calls consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world." -Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

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About Robert M. Pirsig

American writer and philosopher

Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He is best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, published in 1974, and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, published in 1991. His work is shaped by philosophical questions about values, morals, and quality. He also co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings with his wife and editor, Wendy Pirsig, which was published in 2022.

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Books by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2000

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