Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot...

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of ever...

There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as...

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

This forest silence improves anyone.

What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by...

When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.

He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no e...

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other...

If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and ...

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you...

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we ...

This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens...

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you...

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?""If you take care of it.""What do you have to do?""Lo...

You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all t...

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front ...

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying ...

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high countr...

What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all ...

And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator ...

The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of...

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their ...

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things ...

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not ...

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the ...

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand ...

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in compa...

My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to ge...

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity...

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the proces...

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligibl...

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the trav...

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentalit...

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right we...

I don’t know why—it’s just that—I don’t know—they’re not kin."—Surprising word, I think to myself ne...

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with ...

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to th...

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away....

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycl...

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine...

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life not ...

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structu...

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of you...

His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and h...

An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: a...

Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow betwe...

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for see...

grades really cover up failure to teach.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of you...

Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume...

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila

We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do...

The title of this Chautauqua is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," not "Zen and the Art of...

The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as importan...

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of you...

People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of...

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without pri...

I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, f...

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six ...

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between s...

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scien...

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars we...

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

Actually I've never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale for...

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the t...

But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for othe...

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.

Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive f...

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving a...

To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but i...

This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and conc...

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows th...

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be som...

The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was ...

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friend...

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that’s the only name I can think of for it...like the trav...

When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in ...

Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking...

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and ...

Dad?""What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us."What should I be when I grow up?"The bir...

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's...

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in ...

But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole...

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six ...

To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationa...

Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you...

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think...

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found no...

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can...

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.