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
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Interpretation
Metaphysics explores abstract concepts but often lacks practical application.
This quote by Robert M. Pirsig uses the metaphor of a restaurant with an overwhelming menu but no food to illustrate the nature of metaphysics. It suggests that while metaphysics delves into complex and abstract ideas, it often fails to provide concrete answers or practical insights, much like a menu that offers a plethora of choices without actually delivering any sustenance.
In practice
In a lecture on the limits of philosophy, this quote can illustrate the challenges of abstract thought.
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.
But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you - the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
Never believe that the so-called random events of life are anything less than Godβs appointed order. Be ready to discover His divine designs anywhere and everywhere.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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