Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

102. “Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

103. “Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

104. “But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

106. “My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It’s very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

107. “Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

108. “There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

109. “I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

110. “For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

111. “We always condemn most in others that which we most fear in ourselves.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

112. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

113. “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

114. “If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

115. “Good is a noun rather than an adjective.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

116. “From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

117. “The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

118. “Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing’s quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you’ll never regret.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

119. “Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices – TV, jets, freeways and so on – but I hope it’s been made plain that 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

120. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

121. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

122. “Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

123. “Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. 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

124. “One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

125. “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

126. “To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

127. “A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

128. “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

129. “A thing that has no value does not exist.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

130. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

131. “The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

132. “People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

133. “That’s the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

134. “What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. 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

135. “The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

136. “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?”

— Robert M. Pirsig

137. “When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

138. “I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

139. “But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

140. “Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

141. “Quality tends to fan out like waves.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

142. “Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

143. “But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

144. “Familiarity can blind too.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

145. “Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

146. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outwards from there. 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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

147. “Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

148. “Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

149. “You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

150. “It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome 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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig