Robert M. Pirsig quotes - page 3

The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane! (Robert M. Pirsig)
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity. View quote
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? View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word ‘quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality tends to fan out like waves. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The pencil is mightier than the pen. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
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. (Robert M. Pirsig)
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good-need we ask anyone to tell us these things? View quote
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? View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. (Robert M. Pirsig)
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The more you look, the more you see. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig