Robert M. Pirsig Quotes - Page 4

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• The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Flower, Believe, Self

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• You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Perfect, Want, Painting

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• If you run from technology, it will chase you.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Running, Technology, Ifs

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• Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Running, Thinking, Sight

  Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• 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.

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• The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Fun, Hippie, Offering

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

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• The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Differences, World, Patterns

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• Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Simple, Broken

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

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• Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Heart, Social Values, Hands

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Ch. 25, 1974.

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• One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Science, Geometry, Convenient

  1974 Zen and theArt of MotorcycleMaintenance, pt.3, ch.22.

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• The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. 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

  Data, Suffering, Tests

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• To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Buddhist, Believe, Air

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• I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Thinking, May, Trouble

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• The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Art, Children, Men

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM)". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Important, Causes

  Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Foundation, Definitions, Reason

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• From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Beach, Reality, World

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• Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Dark, People

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• The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Serenity, Machines, Tests

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• The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Moving, Humility, Space

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

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• If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Names, Ungrateful, Okay

  Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.56, Harper Collins

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• It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth. and so it goes away. Puzzling.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Truth, Liars, Doors

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• 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

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• I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Ideas, Needs, Currents

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• You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Thinking, Two, America

  "Zen and the art of Robert Pirsig". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

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