Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I really don’t mind dying because I figure I haven’t wasted this life. 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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

52. “Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

53. “When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

54. “Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

55. “The real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

56. “When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

57. “That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

58. “The more you read, the more you calm down.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

59. “The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

60. “A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

61. “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?”

— Robert M. Pirsig

62. “You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. 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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

63. “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 the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

64. “The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

65. “It’s nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won’t end that way.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

66. “Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

67. “New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

68. “The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

69. “Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

70. “The pencil is mightier than the pen.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

71. “Data without generalization is just gossip.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

72. “I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

73. “No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

74. “The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

75. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

76. “Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

77. “When cleaning I do it the way people go to church – not so much to discover anything new, although I’m alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It’s nice to go over familiar paths.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

78. “What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

79. “There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology – the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn’t any good.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

80. “Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

81. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

82. “If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

83. “Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

85. “Between the subject and the object lies the value.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

86. “I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

87. “The intelligence of the mind can’t think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can’t think of any reason to die.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

88. “I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

89. “Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

90. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

91. “You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

92. “The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

93. “If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

94. “The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological 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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

95. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

96. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

97. “If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that you’ve just goofed, you’re not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you’re likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You’re always being fooled, you’re always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

98. “It’s all right,” Phaedrus said. “We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

99. “I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

100. “Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.”

— Robert M. Pirsig