To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small pr… - Robert M. Pirsig

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind [...] I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this — that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes — pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts — all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forger work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? 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 a potential for steel. There's nothing else there."

But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is — religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals — they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.