“To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.” — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.” — 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
“Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and… — 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
“Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less… — 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
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
“If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process… — 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… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. The… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water,… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And… — 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
