Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. 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 characteristic of quality.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

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.