Robert M. Pirsig

“Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“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

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the…

— Robert M. Pirsig

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“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

“As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric…

— Robert M. Pirsig

Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.

— Robert M. Pirsig

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

— Robert M. Pirsig

“This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in…

— Robert M. Pirsig

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the…

— Robert M. Pirsig

Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could…

— Robert M. Pirsig

Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

— Robert M. Pirsig

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.

— Robert M. Pirsig

“I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read…

— Robert M. Pirsig

The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.

— Robert M. Pirsig

“In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that…

— Robert M. Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

— Robert M. Pirsig