Robert M. Pirsig Quotes:

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Topics: Inspirational, Memories, Past, Past Present Future

I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current.

Topics: Ideas, Needs, Currents

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

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Change, Success, Leadership, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Head And Heart

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.

Topics: Blow, Japan, Wind, Recluse

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

Topics: Encouraging, Wisdom, Mountain, Meditation Mindfulness, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Thinking, Talking, Two

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

Topics: Life, Wisdom, Future

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Fun, May, Way

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Destiny, Thinking, People, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Topics: Landscape, World, Awareness, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Reflection, Serenity, Mind, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Peace And Serenity

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.

Topics: Government, Systematic, Succeed, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: Motorcycle, Riding, Maintenance, Motorcycle Riding

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.

Topics: Flower, Thinking, Mountain, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Circuits

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.

Topics: Technology, Giving, Mind, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Mean, Important, Causes

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

Topics: Moving Forward, Moving, Space

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.

source: - NPR Interview, 1974.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Names, Ungrateful, Okay, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Patterns, Looks, Where You Are, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: 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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Moving, Car, Gone, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Opposites, Done, Information, Hypothetical

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.

Topics: Struggle, Order, People, Great Minds

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Topics: Science, Infinity, Facts, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Scientific Facts

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

Topics: Essence, Quality, Absence, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: Motorcycle, Steel, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: World, Blind, Familiarity, Strangeness

If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

Topics: Running, Mountain, Speed, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Exhaustion

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

Topics: Perfect, Want, Painting, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Data, Suffering, Tests

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

Topics: Real, Understanding

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

Topics: Inspirational, Travel, Littles, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: Climbing, Mountain, Summit

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

Topics: Failure, Self, Effort, Glorification, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Blessed, Thinking, Insanity, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.34, Harper Collins

Topics: Mean, Challenges, Want

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. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountains which sustain life, not the top.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Mean, Unique, Reality, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Exhaustion

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.

Topics: Quality, Who Cares, Doe

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

Topics: Attitude, Hard, Ifs

The more you look, the more you see.

Topics: Looks, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

Topics: Ideas, Ifs

A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

source: - "Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert Pirsig, 1991.

Topics: God, Atheist, People, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Anti God

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

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, April 1, 1974.

Topics: Needs, Asks, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.

source: - "Be The CEO Of Your Job" by Brad Feld, www.businessinsider.com. February 2, 2010.

Topics: Easy, Contemplating, Hard

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.

Topics: Answers, Knows, Ten

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

Topics: Men, Civilization, Want

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

Topics: Vision, Awe, Seeing

You are never dedicated to do something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

source: - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pt. 2, ch. 13 (1974)

Topics: Religious, Knowledge, People, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

Topics: Friendship, People, Littles, Little Moments

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.

source: - Source: www.theguardian.com

Topics: May, Way, Moral, Moral Life

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

Topics: Country, Air, Mind

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Struggle, Simple, Oxygen, Nitrogen

Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, April 1, 1974.

Topics: Quality, Knows, Defined

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Thinking, Together, World, Puzzle Piece

Data without generalization is just gossip.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Data, Gossip, Generalization

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

Topics: Teacher, Students, Very Good, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Flunking

The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

Topics: Numbers, Infinite, Given

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Struggle, Intellectual, Roles

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.

Topics: Real, Nice, Years, Nice Guy

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.

Topics: Motivation, Humility, Self

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.

Topics: Nature, Real, Thinking, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.

Topics: Peace, Writing, Mind

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.

source: - NPR Interview, 1974.

Topics: Art, Creativity, Technology

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Artist, Scientist

Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

Topics: Reality, Vision, Moments

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.

source: - Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Lying, Knows, Ifs

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Knowledge, Independent, Learning

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

Topics: Funny, New York, Humorous

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

Topics: Evaluation, Facts, Ability, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Intellectual, Socialism, Communism, Social Control, Communism And Socialism

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

Topics: Thinking, Bridges, Sides, Chisels

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.8, Harper Collins

Topics: Sorry, Years, Gone, Monotony, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.6, Harper Collins

Topics: Truth, Science, Discovery, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Questioning Beliefs

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

Topics: Creativity, Boredom, Periods

The way to solve the conflict between human values and technology needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is--not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.

Topics: Running, Real, Technology

Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Ch. 29, 1974.

Topics: Men, Unity, Quality, Participants

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villian, no 'mean guy' who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

Topics: Mean, Eight, Government, Meaningless Life, Mean Guy

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

Topics: Thinking, Mind, Intellectual, Mind And Matter

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.

Topics: Reality, Thinking, Data

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM)". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Depression, Reflection, Men

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Sight, People, Being Content

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Individual Strength, Church, Weakness, Teachable

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.

Topics: Track, Motorcycle, Important, Gumption

Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig (Ch. 29), 1974.

Topics: Dream, Men, Understanding, Dialectics

Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.

Topics: Understanding, Quality, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Truth, Simple, Rationality, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Flower, Believe, Self

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Topics: Education, Teacher, School, Bad Grades

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

Topics: Running, Technology, Ifs

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.8, Harper Collins

Topics: Running, Thinking, Sight, Losing Time, Sight And Sound

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later...They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Real, Mind, Essentials, Mind And Matter, Form And Substance

Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Mean, Simple, Broken, Analytics, Philosophic

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.

Topics: Serenity, Machines, Tests, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Personal Problems

The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

Topics: Fun, Hippie, Offering

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Ch. 25, 1974.

Topics: Heart, Social Values, Hands, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Head And Heart

The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

Topics: Differences, World, Patterns, Causation, Absolute Certainty

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

source: - 1974 Zen and theArt of MotorcycleMaintenance, pt.3, ch.22.

Topics: Science, Geometry, Convenient

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.

Topics: Buddhist, Believe, Air, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen Buddhist

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

Topics: Thinking, May, Trouble

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM)". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Art, Children, Men, Neanderthals, Common Knowledge

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

Topics: Foundation, Definitions, Reason

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

Topics: Beach, Reality, World, Grains Of Sand

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Moving, Humility, Space

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.

Topics: Religious, Dark, People

It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth. and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Topics: Truth, Liars, Doors, Puzzling, Good Liar

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.

Topics: Goal, Pioneers, Noble, Forging Ahead, Forging

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.9, Harper Collins

Topics: Momentum, Purpose, Losing, Disconnecting, Flooding

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

source: - Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Mind, Dying, Figures

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Topics: Pens, Pencils

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.

Topics: Real, Mind, Salary, Rational Thought

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Jobs, Thinking, Feelings

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.

source: - Source: www.theguardian.com

Topics: Mother, Baby, Arbitrary

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.

Topics: Self, Inner Peace, Mind

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

Topics: Art, Men, Art Is

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Thinking, Everyday, Forget

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

Topics: Believe, Law, People, No Energy

... 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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.41, Harper Collins

Topics: Real, Believe, Law, Just Believe, Laws Of Physics

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?

Topics: Past, Faces, Forget, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

Topics: Substance, World, Patterns, Containment

Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

source: - "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

Topics: Religious, Intellectual, Quality, Verify, Philosophic

The more you read, the more you calm down.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Reading, Calm, Calm Down, Difficulty Of Writing

A thing that has no value does not exist.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Doe, Values

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Struggle, Simple, Patterns

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Truth, Health, Independence

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Thinking, Cells, Mind, Reason To Live

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.

Topics: Distance, People, Today, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Specialization

Between the subject and the object lies the value.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Lying, Subjects, Objects

Good is a noun rather than an adjective.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Unity, Adjectives, Nouns

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, April 1, 1974.

Topics: School, Government, Organization

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Ideas, Ethics, Virtue, Broadmindedness

Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry?

Topics: Struggle, Fall, Simple, Nitrogen

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

Topics: Art, Law, Motorcycle, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Miniatures

I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Fall, Thinking, People, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Edge Of The World

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.

source: - Source: www.theguardian.com

Topics: People, Facts, Patient

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Topics: Cutting, Past, Remember, Cutting Edge

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.

Topics: Lying, Real, Technology

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Topics: Loneliness

The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It's dualistically called a "discovery" because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone's awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.

Topics: Independent, Discovery, Quality, Looseness

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.

source: - 1974 Zen and theArt of MotorcycleMaintenance, pt.3, ch.24.

Topics: Knowledge, Science, Thinking, You Think You Know

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Children, People, Common Sense, Generator, Dialectics

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

Topics: Names, Unity, Together

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

Topics: Understanding, Inner Peace, Mind, Wandering Thoughts, Quietness

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

Topics: Life, Goes On, Habit, Living More

The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Reality, Unity, Way

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people--what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest level of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

Topics: Dream, Ocean, People, Coastal

Science values static patterns.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Science, Patterns, Static

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

Topics: Acceptance, Keys, Understanding, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free of social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Ocean, Night, Wind

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.

source: - interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Eye, Soul, Skins, Heretic

The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them 'till last.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Intellectual, Growth, Way

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.9, Harper Collins

Topics: Fashion, Interesting, Trivia, Pursued

Familiarity can blind too.

Topics: Blind, Familiarity

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Hurt, Hate, War

If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Insane, World, Way

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

Topics: Ideas, Mind, Might

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time".

Topics: Travel, Want, Good Times

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: War, Principles, Body, Human Equality

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Giving, Atheism, Pages, Menus

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: War, Fighting, Thinking

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Reality, Intellectual, Quality

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

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.34, Harper Collins

Topics: Taken, Caring, Granted

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Intellectual, Purpose, Intellectual Freedom

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.

Topics: Ideas, People, Lighthouse

The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealic attitude

Topics: Attitude, Independent, Ideas

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM)". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Real, Philosophical, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance, Cycles

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.

source: - Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Morning, Wall, Night

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.21, Harper Collins

Topics: Hippie, Simple, People, Beatnik

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

source: - Source: www.theguardian.com

Topics: Dharma, Unpredictable, Persons

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.

Topics: Real, Heart, Technology, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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

source: - "Zen and the art of Robert Pirsig". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Opposites, Funny Things, Envy

In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.

source: - "Principles of Research". Address at the Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's 60th birthday, www.site.uottawa.ca. 1918.

Topics: Temples, Motive, Various

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.

Topics: Quality, Doe, Way

So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?

Topics: Spinning, Wheels, Hell, Traction

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

Topics: Quality, Events

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

Topics: Passion, Understanding, Mind

Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Intellectual, Social, Subjects

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

Topics: Reflection, People, Interesting, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

Topics: Attitude, Book, Writing, High Quality

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.43, Harper Collins

Topics: Blessed, Law, Ideas, Human Inventions

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.

Topics: Science, Chaos, Social

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Understanding, Littles, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

source: - Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

Topics: Culture, Protect, Norm

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.

Topics: Stones, Tablets, Bigs

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Jobs, Reality, Quality

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Life, Law, Degrees

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.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Quality, World, Defining, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

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.

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Topics: Social Values, Support, Intellectual

That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.

source: - 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' (1974) pt. 3, ch. 25

Topics: Running, Mind, Looks

Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Distance, Loneliness, Psychics

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

source: - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Topics: Distance, Loneliness, Psychics, Coastal

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

Topics: Nice, Journey, Way

"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."

source: - Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.59, Harper Collins

Topics: Want, Asks

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

Topics: Logic, Sometimes, Scientist