From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence:

"A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniture study of the art of rationality itself."

"In all of the Oriental religions, great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened."

"To live only for some future goal is shallow".

"We keep passing through little moments of other people's lives."

Pirsig was going crazy in his pursuit of defining Quality

Talked about dialectics .

Even mentions Mu a bit.

Divides human understanding into two kinds:

Classical understanding. - Underlying form of reality. Straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical, and carefully proportioned.

Romantic understanding. - Immediate experience. Inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive.

Uses an intellectual scalpel. - "When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

Talking about Phaedrus (a former self):

"He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's' insane."
(Sounds like Foucault could have written those words.)

"...there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.

I haven't really had a new idea in years. They are all stolen from him."

"...to talk about Phaedrus' break from the mainstream of rational thought in pursuit of the ghost of rationality itself."

"Dialectic generally means 'of the nature of the dialogue', which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a cross examination, by which truth is arrived at. It's the mode of discourse of Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato. Plato believed the dialectic was the sole method by which the truth was arrived at. The only one."