Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Robert M. Pirsig, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Robert M. Pirsig quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 337 Robert M. Pirsig quotes for you to read and share.

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But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know? -- Robert M. Pirsig
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(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor ... to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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So green this summer and so fresh. There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish "principles" and study "methods" and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries - the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That's the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When cleaning I do it the way people go to church - not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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May, will you please, kindly DIG it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you'll never get time to KNOW. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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the competence of a speaker has no relevance to the truth -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A thing that has no value does not exist. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality tends to fan out like waves. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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 do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The more you read, the more you calm down. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.' -- Robert M. Pirsig
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That's the way it is. The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die -- Robert M. Pirsig
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One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing's quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret -- Robert M. Pirsig
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An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The pencil is mightier than the pen. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Good is a noun rather than an adjective. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles either. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one node or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I know what it is! We've arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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As long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there's always a roar and you can't fall anywhere. You're already there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over-motivation- leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road ... old buildings, old people on a front porch ... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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... the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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(1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when you're in it and work on that before you continue on the machine. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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First you get the feeling, then you figure out why. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mental reflection os so much more interesting than tv [that]it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Familiarity can blind you -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the "College," in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I make some jokes about it, but they're not funny and just add to the depression. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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They just hate it when people make love. And then they'll go to a fistfight where somebody's really hurt and all covered with bloodand they'll just love that. Or a war and stuff like that. They're all mixed up and they're trying to take it out on you so you get mixed up too. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness," in other words - are completely outside its domain. We -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge, -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology ... Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat, -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself - and from each other. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's all taking the customer's money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time" ... -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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This forest silence improves anyone. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell ... is it? -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Dad?"
"What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us.
"What should I be when I grow up?"
The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Cromwell's statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going, -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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... a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Oh, the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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And from time to time you find your "county road" takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer's backyard. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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There's no such thing as morality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even that idea this afternoon about caring and technology - they are not my own. I haven't really had a new idea in years. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context,as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you run from technology, it will chase you. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally ... mind control ... . -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you don't generalize you don't philosophize. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.' -- Robert M. Pirsig
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And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource - individual worth. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas -- Robert M. Pirsig
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People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"
"Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That's the Code of the West. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty ... -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation ... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Between the subject and the object lies the value. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren't what he needs or what's sought ... . I don't know what he needs, or what's sought. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Data without generalization is just gossip. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything ... It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Have. Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration's programs, We'll just try them ... and if they don't work ... why then we'll just try something else. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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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. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what's going on. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You don't have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To -- Robert M. Pirsig
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That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness ... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! ... Ghosts. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The motorcycle is a system. A real system. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that's not there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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And he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Familiarity can blind too. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The real University ... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues ... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you MUST rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos ... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man ... -- Robert M. Pirsig
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From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristics of Quality -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is the Buddha. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality isn't a thing. It is an event. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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I turn my head from side to side. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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It's the clothes that make them think you're not really there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The idea that "all men are created equal" is a gift to the world from the American Indian. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Stuckness. That's what I want to talk about today. Back -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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The struggle of the noble, free-thinking -- Robert M. Pirsig
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When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? -- Robert M. Pirsig
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You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides. -- Robert M. Pirsig
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To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. -- Robert M. Pirsig