Robert M. Pirsig

Good is a noun rather than an adjective.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Quality tends to fan out like waves.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Science values static patterns.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Data without generalization is just gossip.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.

— Robert M. Pirsig

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

— Robert M. Pirsig

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

Between the subject and the object lies the value.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.

— Robert M. Pirsig

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

— Robert M. Pirsig

The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise…

— Robert M. Pirsig

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are…

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two…

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows…

— Robert M. Pirsig

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great…

— Robert M. Pirsig

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the…

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a…

— Robert M. Pirsig

The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University…

— Robert M. Pirsig

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really…

— Robert M. Pirsig

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of…

— Robert M. Pirsig

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the…

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—TV, jets, freeways…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars, and people caught up in this primary America…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“I always feel like I’m in church when I do this…The”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

— Robert M. Pirsig