Robert M. Pirsig Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Robert M. Pirsig
Robert M. Pirsig Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Robert M. Pirsig on Wise Famous Quotes.
The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.
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.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
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.
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.
Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That
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.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
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.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.
It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.
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.
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
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.
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.
"Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That's the Code of the West.
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.
It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.