Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

203. “The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

204. “Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

205. “That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

207. “Dad?” “What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. “What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

208. “The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!”

— Robert M. Pirsig

209. “There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

210. “Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

211. “Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

212. “A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

213. “And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer’s backyard.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

214. “When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

215. “When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

216. “Another one is cleaning up tool that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

217. “You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

218. “Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. This isn’t a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

219. “Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

220. “Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

221. “You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isn’t a mechanic alive who doesn’t louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don’t hear about it – just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at least get the benefit of some education.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

222. “May, will you please, kindly DIG it,” he remembered one of them saying, “and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you’ll never get time to KNOW.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

223. “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.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

224. “A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

225. “Civilization, or “the system” or “society” or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

226. “You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn’t shot anybody. Yet.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

227. “One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

228. “So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn’t show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to ‘get somewhere’ it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

229. “The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one’s self.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

230. “The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the “College,” in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

231. “Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of “mathematical beauty,” of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

232. “It was the ghost of rationality itself... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that 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. That is what the ghost says.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

233. “I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman’s game, though that is changing.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

234. “These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

235. “First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

236. “The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

237. “To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

238. “You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

239. “Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder’s mask.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

240. “You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?” But Phaedrus is prepared. “Forensic, deliberative and epideictic,” he answers calmly. “What are the epideictic techniques?” “The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

241. “I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

242. “From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

243. “You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they’re changing all the time and the changes aren’t always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

244. “Science values static patterns.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

245. “An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

246. “Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

247. “This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

248. “If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

249. “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

250. “The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.”

— Robert M. Pirsig