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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Morning
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.Collection: Experience
To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Truth
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.Collection: Food
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.Collection: Brainy
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.Collection: Alone
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.Collection: Independence
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.Collection: Funny
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.Collection: Future
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'Collection: Famous
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.Collection: Great
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.Collection: Truth
If you run from technology, it will chase you.Collection: Technology
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
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?
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
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.
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.
The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
Quality is the Buddha.
There's no such thing as morality.
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.
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.
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.
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.'
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.
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.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Quality
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.Collection: God
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.Collection: Moving
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.Collection: Attitude
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.Collection: Mean
every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.Collection: Answers
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.Collection: Country
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.Collection: Art
It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.Collection: Easy
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arriveCollection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Blessed
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Nature