The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
Robert M. PirsigRead
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Interpretation
Familiarity with the ordinary can obscure our understanding of the world.
This quote by Robert M. Pirsig suggests that what often makes our perception of the world unclear is not its oddities or strangeness, but rather the mundane and everyday aspects we take for granted. When we become overly accustomed to our surroundings, we may fail to see their true nature and significance, highlighting the idea that familiarity can lead to a kind of blindness that prevents deeper appreciation and understanding.
In practice
In a discussion about why we overlook simple joys in life, this quote can serve as a reminder.
The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.
It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.
There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
It is only by questioning what people take for granted, what people hold to be true, that we can break through the hypnosis of social conditioning.
The universe has a body and soul and evolves through cosmic time. As microcosms of stardust, we do the same.
There is nothing on earth that I would not give up, excepting of course, two things and two things only, truth and nonviolence.
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