Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

252. “It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

253. “John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

254. “Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

255. “When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

256. “He wasn’t going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they’d just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn’t see is that she is adjusting. That’s what the insanity is. She’s adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

257. “Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

258. “A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

259. “And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

260. “What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

261. “It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

262. “It’s the clothes that make them think you’re not really there.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

263. “Cliches and stereotypes such as “beatnik” or “hippie” have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

264. “Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

265. “He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

266. “To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

267. “He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it... He make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience...”

— Robert M. Pirsig

268. “I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

269. “Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one node or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

270. “Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination – “unstuckness,” in other words – are completely outside its domain.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

271. “Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

272. “The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

273. “He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

274. “When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

275. “Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

276. “There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

277. “These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely you’re bound to be very discouraged very soon if you’ve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

278. “The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

279. “If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They’ve got stamina. They know how to keep on going.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

280. “I’m about to sharpen up the engine a little.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

281. “Drifting is what one does.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

282. “Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

283. “She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

284. “I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

285. “That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

286. “What the classical formalists meant by the objection “Quality is just what you like” was that this subjective, undefined “quality” he was teaching was just romantic surface appeal. Classroom popularity contests could determine whether a composition had immediate appeal, all right, but was this Quality? Was Quality something that you “just see” or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?”

— Robert M. Pirsig

287. “I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. 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 a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

288. “Zen is the “spirit of the valley”, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

289. “I turn my head from side to side.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

290. “People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

291. “Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

292. “What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

293. “Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

294. “Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

295. “People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

296. “The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

297. “Between the lines Phaedrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal smugness of the professional academician.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

298. “You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

299. “One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

300. “He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that’s not there.”

— Robert M. Pirsig