Top 100 Pirsig Quotes
#1. The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.
Sean Carroll
#2. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.
William Zinsser
#3. Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
Richard Dawkins
#4. The more you look, the more you see. - Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Pirsig
#5. They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.
Robert M. Pirsig
#6. The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
Robert M. Pirsig
#8. The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#9. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Robert M. Pirsig
#11. I make some jokes about it, but they're not funny and just add to the depression.
Robert M. Pirsig
#12. I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig
#13. but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness," in other words - are completely outside its domain. We
Robert M. Pirsig
#14. The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
Robert M. Pirsig
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. And because without objects there can be no subject-- because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself-- quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Robert Pirsig
#20. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
Robert M. Pirsig
#21. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
Robert M. Pirsig
#22. A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all.
Robert M. Pirsig
#23. 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
#24. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
#25. Every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.
Robert M. Pirsig
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#29. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.
Robert M. Pirsig
#30. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor ... to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.
Robert M. Pirsig
#31. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
Robert M. Pirsig
#32. ...there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed.
Robert Pirsig
#34. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known.
Robert M. Pirsig
#35. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
#36. Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#37. I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#38. Mental reflection os so much more interesting than tv [that]it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is.
Robert M. Pirsig
#39. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
Robert M. Pirsig
#40. Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.
Robert M. Pirsig
#41. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.
Robert M. Pirsig
#42. Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#43. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold
Robert M. Pirsig
#44. For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
Robert M. Pirsig
#45. The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Robert M. Pirsig
#46. The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.
Robert M. Pirsig
#47. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Robert M. Pirsig
#48. 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
#49. Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
Robert M. Pirsig
#50. Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology ... Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#51. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.
Robert M. Pirsig
#52. Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state.
Robert M. Pirsig
#53. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
Robert M. Pirsig
#54. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
Robert M. Pirsig
#57. 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
#58. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.
Robert M. Pirsig
#59. Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.
Robert M. Pirsig
#60. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
Robert M. Pirsig
#62. 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
#63. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Robert M. Pirsig
#64. I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.
Robert M. Pirsig
#65. 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
#66. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Robert M. Pirsig
#67. 99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down.
Robert M. Pirsig
#68. 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 characteristics of Quality
Robert M. Pirsig
#69. Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning;
Robert M. Pirsig
#70. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! ... Ghosts.
Robert M. Pirsig
#71. Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.
Robert M. Pirsig
#72. 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
#73. If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?
Robert M. Pirsig
#74. I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
Robert M. Pirsig
#76. Whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
Robert M. Pirsig
#77. So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell ... is it?
Robert M. Pirsig
#78. 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
#79. It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#82. Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
Robert M. Pirsig
#83. That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Robert M. Pirsig
#84. (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
#85. (What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Robert M. Pirsig
#86. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
Robert M. Pirsig
#87. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
#88. 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
#89. Not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much.
Robert M. Pirsig
#90. Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road ... old buildings, old people on a front porch ... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.
Robert M. Pirsig
#91. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#93. The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#94. 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
#95. Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing's quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret
Robert M. Pirsig
#96. In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty ...
Robert M. Pirsig
#97. As long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.
Robert M. Pirsig
#98. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
Robert M. Pirsig
#99. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.
Robert M. Pirsig
#100. 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
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