Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I… — 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… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody.… — 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
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
You are never dedicated to do something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be… — 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
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people--what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
They just hate it when people make love. And then they'll go to a fistfight where somebody's really hurt and all covered… — 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
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance. — 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
