From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

— “The truth knocks on the door and you say, Go away, I'm looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

— “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

— “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

— “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.”

— “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.”

From A Walk Across America

—“As the lifetime-long days passed I began to notice a profound cleansing taking place in myself as we were immersed in the peaceful Pennsylvania farm valleys. The streams and cotton-clean clouds washed my soul and I felt myself opening up to the world.”

— “No more distractions. The elation of finally being alone was total. We walked straight west. I had everything I needed in the world resting comfortably on my shoulders, and the entire country waiting to be discovered.”

—“It had happened again. I had met another American whose generosity, it began to seem to me, gushed out of the spirit of this land.”

From Blue Highways

— “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.”

— “A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.”

— “If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.”

— “Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and future, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers, the greatest is this: To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within - he reaches farther out.”

— “A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure—it’s ridiculously easy to find.”