Robert Pirsig

“I like the word ‘gumption’ because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it…

— Robert Pirsig

“He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends…

— Robert Pirsig

“If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the…

— Robert Pirsig

“At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that "The number…

— Robert Pirsig

“For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying…

— Robert Pirsig

“Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles…

— Robert Pirsig

“It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately…

— Robert Pirsig

“Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought”

— Robert Pirsig

“We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that that where people are the most closely crowded in the big…

— Robert Pirsig

“...there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed.”

— Robert Pirsig

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

— Robert Pirsig

“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a…

— Robert Pirsig

“He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the…

— Robert Pirsig

“That's the way it is. The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway…

— Robert Pirsig

“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to…

— Robert Pirsig