Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

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.

The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect.

It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.

It's better not to see than to see wrongly.

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.

The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.

... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.

Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

Data without generalization is just gossip.

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

The more you look, the more you see.

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

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.

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.

"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."

Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.