Top 100 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes
#1. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#2. When cleaning I do it the way people go to church - not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.
Robert M. Pirsig
#3. Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge.
Robert M. Pirsig
#4. A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#5. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
Robert M. Pirsig
#6. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.
Robert M. Pirsig
#7. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Robert M. Pirsig
#8. Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.
Robert M. Pirsig
#9. The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Robert M. Pirsig
#10. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.
Robert M. Pirsig
#11. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
Robert M. Pirsig
#13. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#14. We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone.
Robert M. Pirsig
#15. A ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig
#16. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles either.
Robert M. Pirsig
#17. I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#19. (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.
Robert M. Pirsig
#20. It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.
Robert M. Pirsig
#21. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#22. The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#23. When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
Robert M. Pirsig
#24. Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over-motivation- leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind.
Robert M. Pirsig
#26. The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
Robert M. Pirsig
#27. If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.
Robert M. Pirsig
#28. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum
Robert M. Pirsig
#30. Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know.
Robert M. Pirsig
#31. Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.
Robert M. Pirsig
#32. Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#33. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.
Robert M. Pirsig
#34. You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.
Robert M. Pirsig
#35. The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self.
Robert M. Pirsig
#36. The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.
Robert M. Pirsig
#37. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent.
Robert M. Pirsig
#38. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.
Robert M. Pirsig
#39. You don't have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle.
Robert M. Pirsig
#40. When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#41. Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
Robert M. Pirsig
#42. One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.
Robert M. Pirsig
#43. People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.
Robert M. Pirsig
#44. I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current.
Robert M. Pirsig
#45. The stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.
Robert M. Pirsig
#46. That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.
Robert M. Pirsig
#47. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
Robert M. Pirsig
#48. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.
Robert M. Pirsig
#49. After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.
Robert M. Pirsig
#50. Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought
Robert M. Pirsig
#51. I know what it is! We've arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country.
Robert M. Pirsig
#52. When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.
Robert M. Pirsig
#53. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
#54. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities.
Robert M. Pirsig
#55. That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#57. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
#58. A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.
Robert M. Pirsig
#59. So green this summer and so fresh. There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know.
Robert M. Pirsig
#60. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#61. New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
Robert M. Pirsig
#62. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
Robert M. Pirsig
#63. The real University ... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues ... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.
Robert M. Pirsig
#64. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat,
Robert M. Pirsig
#65. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Robert M. Pirsig
#67. The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#68. This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.
Robert M. Pirsig
#69. People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#71. Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
Robert M. Pirsig
#72. It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#73. I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out.
Robert M. Pirsig
#74. What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
Robert M. Pirsig
#75. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
#76. My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.
Robert M. Pirsig
#77. People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.
Robert M. Pirsig
#78. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
Robert M. Pirsig
#79. The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
Robert M. Pirsig
#80. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
#81. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
Robert M. Pirsig
#82. Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Robert M. Pirsig
#83. Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#84. I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.
Robert M. Pirsig
#85. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource - individual worth.
Robert M. Pirsig
#86. To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context,as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land.
Robert M. Pirsig
#87. Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.
Robert M. Pirsig
#89. If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good.
Robert M. Pirsig
#90. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Robert M. Pirsig
#91. Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#92. Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.
Robert M. Pirsig
#93. People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
Robert M. Pirsig
#94. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything ... It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved.
Robert M. Pirsig
#95. Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#96. It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally ... mind control ... .
Robert M. Pirsig
#97. Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
Robert M. Pirsig
#98. I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig
#99. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
#100. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.
Robert M. Pirsig
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