Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

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

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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.

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

1294

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

2717

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.

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

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

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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.

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The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

1471

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.

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…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

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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.

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Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.

1210

A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all.

1843

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?

3403

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

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

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