Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “The kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

305. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

306. “Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles” and study “methods” and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries – the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

307. “Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

308. “Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

309. “But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

310. “Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.” Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

311. “One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

312. “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

313. “It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

314. “The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience – chaos.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

315. “I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

316. “In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

317. “What you need is an hypothesis for how you’re going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around. This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

318. “Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

319. “I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

320. “The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

324. “Now anybody can be “kind.” And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

325. “When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what’s going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what’s going on.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

326. “After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

327. “My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

328. “The answer doesn’t seem to satisfy him. But he can’t seem to say what’s wrong with it.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

329. “The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are “value free,” that is, “quality free,” has got to go.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

330. “Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

331. “No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

332. “Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

333. “The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.”

— Robert M. Pirsig