Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping.

He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be here.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.

He was insane. And 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.

Actually, a root word of technology, techne , originally meant art. The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.

Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding.

These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely you're bound to be very discouraged very soon if you've derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality.

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance.

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an I a soul, which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.

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.

They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.

Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.

My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.

A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.

The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological 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.

Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge.

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine.

What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves.

And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource—individual worth.