Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Familiarity can blind too.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

157. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

159. “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

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160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

181. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

188. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

190. “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

191. “That is impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

200. “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