Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Rationality

Quotes about: Rationality

• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later...They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Mind, Essentials

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• 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

• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Individual Strength, Church, Weakness

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Numbers, Infinite, Given

• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Giving, Atheism, Pages

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

• The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Truth, Simple, Rationality

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Art, Law, Motorcycle

• Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Confusing, Deals, Rationality

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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