Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

152. “The statement “To travel is better than to arrive” comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

153. “The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

154. “You go up the mountaintop and all you’re gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

155. “Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

156. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

157. “Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

158. “The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

159. “A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

160. “The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

161. “We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

162. “Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

163. “What I am is a heretic who’s recanted, and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

164. “Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

165. “It’s better not to see than to see wrongly.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

166. “It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

167. “For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

168. “It’s better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

169. “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

170. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

171. “Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there’s nothing ahead but increasing darkness.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

172. “People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

173. “Zen is the “spirit of the valley,” not the mountaintop.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

174. “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. 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

175. “Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

176. “You’ve got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That’s my moral for the day.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

177. “I really don’t mind dying because I figure I haven’t wasted this life.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

178. “If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

179. “One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

180. “We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

181. “Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

182. “But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

183. “Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

184. “An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

185. “Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

186. “99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother’s face without having it defined. It’s just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

187. “If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?”

— Robert M. Pirsig

188. “I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

189. “Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we’re paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

190. “Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people – what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

191. “You don’t have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

192. “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

193. “I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they’re convinced, you get out.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

194. “Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

195. “The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

196. “A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassembles and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

197. “Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

198. “This forest silence improves anyone.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

199. “The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

200. “The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.”

— Robert M. Pirsig