Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

253. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

265. “The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one’s work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

270. “Drifting is what one does.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

276. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

294. “My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

296. “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

297. “Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

299. “I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

300. “His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn’t because he wasn’t working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I’m fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations.”

— Robert M. Pirsig