Top 30 R Pirsig Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. ...there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed.
Robert Pirsig
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.
Robert M. Pirsig
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
Robert M. Pirsig
#16. 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
#17. 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
#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. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig
#25. I make some jokes about it, but they're not funny and just add to the depression.
Robert M. Pirsig
#27. 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
#28. The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#29. How can I love all this so much and be insane?
Robert Pirsig
#30. 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
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