From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears:… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world.… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value"… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
“I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say:… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
“Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
“Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality.… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
“What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share
