Top 300 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

303. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Robert M. Pirsig

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

— 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