Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

2. “Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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4. “Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

5. “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

8. “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

9. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

10. “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

12. “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

13. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

14. “Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

15. “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

17. “Is it hard?? Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

18. “My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

19. “Quality isn’t a thing. It is an event.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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21. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

22. “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

23. “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

24. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

25. “If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

26. “The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

27. “It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

28. “For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

29. “The solutions all are simple – after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

30. “The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

31. “An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

32. “Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

33. “It’s not the ‘nice’ guy who brings about real social change. ‘Nice’ guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the ‘bad’ guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

34. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

35. “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

36. “There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

37. “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

38. “One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

39. “Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

42. “If you don’t generalize you don’t philosophize.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

43. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

44. “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than on “time”...”

— Robert M. Pirsig

45. “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the physic predecessor of all real understanding.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

46. “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

47. “When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

48. “Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

49. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

50. “We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.”

— Robert M. Pirsig