Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, NPR interview, Jul. 12, 1974
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Funny thing about insane people ... is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, The Observer, Nov. 18, 2006
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.
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.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Familiarity can blind too.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe's discovery of footprints on the sand.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hopytheses, the shorter the time span of the truth.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn't screw up.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, The Observer, Nov. 18, 2006
Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technology needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is--not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It's dualistically called a "discovery" because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone's awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, "Get out." You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people--what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest level of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
