Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Can one review this book? Well, I definitely cannot. Its as much heavy as the author's first book in terms of concentration. The chapters where Phaedrus talks to just himself are the ones to look out for. Those stay my favourite.
My favourite quotes from the book:

1) What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even just a defective unit of the society. Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for society to kill an idea.
2) When E.B. White wrote, 'If you want to live in New York you should be willing to be lucky', he meant not just 'lucky' but willing to be lucky.
3)It's the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don't save them. They sink you.
4) Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
5) That’s what funerals were: theatre. They weren’t for the corpse, certainly, but to help end the longings and old patterns of the living, who has to go on.



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