Robert M. Pirsig

Quotes

• “The title of this Chautauqua is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," not "Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing,"...”
• “Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now ...”
• “When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want...”
• “The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructo...”
• “Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could ...”
• “The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal diffe...”
• “There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments t...”
• “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...”
• “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should ...”
• “Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how...”
• “When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruc...”
• “Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics ...”
• “Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be makin...”
• “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works...”
• “He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters w...”
• “You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the chan...”
• “This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and ...”
• “This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You ...”
• “People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them ...”
• “Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've bee...”
• “What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every st...”
• “If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell any...”
• “Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and ...”
• “The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which ...”
• “Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapi...”
• “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquilit...”
• “This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you ...”
• “Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections ...”
• “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 thei...”
• “A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If yo...”
• “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 ...”
• “Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails...”
• “He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters w...”
• “To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting me...”
• “She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what...”
• “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...”
• “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....”
• “The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
• “People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.”
• “The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.”
• “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life not the top.”
• “I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.”
• “For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.”
• “Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”
• “One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.”
• “An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.”
• “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”
• “Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.”
• “Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.”
• “When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.”