Hi All,
Thought I'd share a few quotes with you.
These are from some great Russian writers and poets (being Russian and into Literature, may explain my choice), who echo some MoQ basics long before Pirsig formulated it.
Hope this isn't too far off of the subject matter and is of some interest...
Striving towards perfection is the purpose of life.
-L. Tolstoy
Every sort of deviation from customs takes a great amount of effort. Meanwhile, the first step towards achieving perfection is always directly connected with such deviation.
-L. Tolstoy
The understanding of the true meaning of life is either unachievable or so simple that it is revealed only to fools and children.
-L. Tolstoy
Goodness is the eternal and supreme aim of our life. Whatever the meaning we put into goodness, our life is an explicit striving for it.
-L. Tolstoy
Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.
-V. Mayakovsky
"Everybody has the right to know everything" - is a false slogan of a false era; the long-lost right of the people not to know everything, not to cram their godly soul with all sorts of rumors, small talk, and hearsay is of much higher value.
-A. Solzhenitsyn
A man's life-journey mainly becomes an experience in moral growth; its objective is to end life a better human being than one was when he started it.
-Solzhenitsyn
Basically, an outstanding person, a person of greatness, a person with rare and unexpected initiatives cannot let himself be known; there would instantly be thousands of traps set up against him. Thus, mediocrity rules under the mask of democratic restraints.
-A. Solzhenitsyn
Man has a predilection for systems and abstract deductions and he is ready to deny the evidence of his own senses only to justify his own logic.
-F. Dostoevsky
Art is the communication of ecstasy.
-P. Uspensky
Beauty elevates the moral virtues.
-V. Belinsky
The weight of heavy thoughts - it drew me upward,
While wings of flesh seduced me to the grave.
-V. Vysotsky
A canary with someone else's voice,
Is a pitiful and funny trinket.
World needs a melodic song,
So, sing your own way, even as a cricket.
-S. Esenin
True literature can exist only when it is created not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics.
Y. Zamyatin
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