Top 242 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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

There's no such thing as morality.

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?

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.

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

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

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

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

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

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.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

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

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.

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

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.

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

Quality is the Buddha.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

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.

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

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

No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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