Robert M. Pirsig Quotes & Sayings

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

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

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

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. And — Robert M. Pirsig

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 levels 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 so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature ... I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important and 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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila — Robert M. Pirsig

Familiarity can blind too. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Quality tends to fan out like waves. — Robert M. Pirsig

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?" But Phaedrus is prepared. "Forensic, deliberative and epideictic," he answers calmly. "What are the epideictic techniques?" "The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

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

Quality is the Buddha. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

Stuckness. That's what I want to talk about today. Back — Robert M. Pirsig

He felt that 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. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. — Robert M. Pirsig

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience - chaos. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist — Robert M. Pirsig

That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It's not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of "success" to something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work toward that does not confine. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The ultimate test is 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 our personal problems right into the machine.
The machine responds to your personality. It's just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are defaulted so rapidly and completely you're bound to be very discouraged very soon if you've derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.
The real machine you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be out there and the person that appears to be in here are not 2 separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous. They're — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty ... — Robert M. Pirsig

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers. — Robert M. Pirsig

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? ...
Little children were trained not to do "just what they liked' but ... but what? ... Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.
When you are trained to despise "just what you like" then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others - a good slave. When you learn not to do "just what you like" then the System loves you. — Robert M. Pirsig

I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it youre 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. Theres a very close analogue there. — Robert M. Pirsig

He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting. That's what the insanity is. She's adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn't necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn't necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure. — Robert M. Pirsig

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see. — Robert M. Pirsig

It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be the precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well — Robert M. Pirsig

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere. — Robert M. Pirsig

The motorcycle is a system. A real system. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

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

We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything. — Robert M. Pirsig

The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "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 — Robert M. Pirsig

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