“You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right… — 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
“Quality ... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.” — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like… — 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
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
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
“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
The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them.… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that… — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing… — 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
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality. — Robert M. Pirsig Copy Share Image
“May, will you please, kindly DIG it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions?… — 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
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality. — 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
“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
