Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Purpose

Quotes about: Purpose

• The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Nature, Real, Thinking

• The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Opposites, Purpose, Done

• To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villian, no 'mean guy' who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Eight, Government

• It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Struggle, Order, People

• 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

  Momentum, Purpose, Losing

  Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.9, Harper Collins

• Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Struggle, Order, People

• 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

  Intellectual, Purpose, Intellectual Freedom

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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