Robert M. Pirsig
That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.Collection: Motorcycle
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.Collection: Atheism
Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.Collection: Thinking
Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.Collection: Understanding
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.Collection: Spiritual
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?Collection: Needs
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.Collection: Men
The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.Collection: Individual Strength
When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.Collection: Depression
New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.Collection: Funny
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit about stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption. If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.Collection: Track
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite 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 or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.Collection: Flower
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.Collection: People
The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self.Collection: Flower
The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.Collection: Numbers
Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.Collection: Dream
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.Collection: Perfect
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.Collection: Moving
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Opposites
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.Collection: Failure
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.Collection: Struggle
Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology...Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality.Collection: Art
My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Government
Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over-motivation- leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Looks
Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.Collection: Quality
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.Collection: Evaluation
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.Collection: Reflection
Data without generalization is just gossip.Collection: Data
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.Collection: Spiritual
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.Collection: Sorry
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.Collection: Men
It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.Collection: Thinking
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.Collection: Reality
Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.Collection: Essence
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technology needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is--not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.Collection: Running
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...Collection: Country