Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution,… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not,… — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
