Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

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Robert M. Pirsig

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : September 6, 1928

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

Robert M. Pirsig

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

Robert M. Pirsig

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.

Robert M. Pirsig

We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

Robert M. Pirsig

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

Robert M. Pirsig

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

Robert M. Pirsig

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

Robert M. Pirsig

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

Robert M. Pirsig

There's no such thing as morality.

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

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

Robert M. Pirsig