Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

128 quotes in 1735 categories

• I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.
• It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest...The explanation…
• How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an…
• When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to…
• When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
• The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
• Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
• Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into…
• I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it youre presumed to…
• The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in…
• A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit about stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see…
• Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
• It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling…
• Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
• The more you look, the more you see.
• Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you…
• Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
• I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.
• To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even…
• When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a…

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