Robert M. Pirsig quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Robert M. Pirsig on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.

Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere.

The stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.

You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

Cromwell's statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going,

I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little.

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

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

The more you look, the more you see.

It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally ... mind control ... .

I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping.

Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

Between the subject and the object lies the value.

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

You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.

I turn my head from side to side.

Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That

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

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

Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.

Quality is the Buddha.

New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! ... Ghosts.

You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.

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

Stuckness. That's what I want to talk about today. Back

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

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

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.

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

Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

This forest silence improves anyone.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

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

I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.

Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take.

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

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

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

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

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

Familiarity can blind you

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

My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.

The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.

If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.

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

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

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.

As long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there's nothing ahead but increasing darkness.

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.

Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.

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

The idea that "all men are created equal" is a gift to the world from the American Indian.

The struggle of the noble, free-thinking

Do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good.

The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To

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

Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind.

It's better not to see than to see wrongly.

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.

Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"
"Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That's the Code of the West.

The motorcycle is a system. A real system.

Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.

From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.

Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask.

I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.

It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.

It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.

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

Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.