Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

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.

Good is a noun rather than an adjective.

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.

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.

Familiarity can blind too.

A thing that has no value does not exist.

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

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.

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

Between the subject and the object lies the value.

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.

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

Science values static patterns.

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

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

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

Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

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

I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.

If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.

You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

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

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

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

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 their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.

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

Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.

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

I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.

Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila

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 rest.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.