Robert M. Pirsig quotes

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Inspirational #Memories #Past

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

#Ideas #Needs #Currents

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Change #Success #Leadership

I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Blow #Japan #Wind

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

#Encouraging #Wisdom #Mountain

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

#Thinking #Talking #Two

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

#Life #Wisdom #Future

The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Kids #Bully #Scared

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

#God #People #Insanity

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

#Fun #May #Way

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#People #Innocent #Fanaticism

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

#Destiny #Thinking #People

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

#Landscape #World #Awareness

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

#Reflection #Serenity #Mind

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

#Government #Systematic #Succeed

Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Motorcycle #Riding #Maintenance

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

#Flower #Thinking #Mountain

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

#Technology #Giving #Mind

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

#Mean #Important #Causes

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

#Moving Forward #Moving #Space

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit about stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption. If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Track #Motorcycle #Important

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Art #Quality #Art Is

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Technology #Evil #Tendencies

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

#Names #Ungrateful #Okay

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

#Patterns #Looks #Where You Are

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

#Shining #Mind #Way

In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Moving #Car #Gone

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Opposites #Done #Information

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that 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. That is what the ghost says.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Struggle #Order #People

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Science #Infinity #Facts

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Essence #Quality #Absence

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

#Sorry #Years #Gone

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Motorcycle #Steel

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

#World #Blind #Familiarity

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

#Quality #Doe #Care

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

#Running #Mountain #Speed

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

#Nature #Real #Thinking

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

#Perfect #Want #Painting

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Data #Suffering #Tests

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Real #Understanding

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Inspirational #Travel #Littles

The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

#Climbing #Mountain #Summit

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

#Failure #Self #Effort

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

#Knives #Process #Analytics

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

#Blessed #Thinking #Insanity

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

#Mean #Challenges #Want