Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.

The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.

Drifting is what one does

The statement "To travel is better than to arrive" comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

It's a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough? If you take care of it. What do you have to do? Lot's of things. You've been watching me. Will you show me all of them? Sure. Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.

The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!

For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes 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. "All

Cerchi di capire dove stai andando e dove sei, e ti sembra che la tua vita non abbia senso. Ma quando dài uno sguardo indietro si delineano delle costanti, e se ti proietti in avanti partendo da quelle, a volte ti capita di scoprire qualcosa.

He isn't so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

Forms and mannerisms...hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row readers, mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A's while those who possess the real areté sit silently in back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.

Cuando una persona sufre espejismos, eso se denomina locura. Cuando muchas personas sufren espejismos, se denomina religión.

1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.

Reaching from mystery into deeper mystery, it is the gate to the secret of all life. Quality is all-pervading. And its use is inexhaustible! Fathomless!

I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road. 5

What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.

I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

La Iglesia de la Razón, como todas las instituciones del Sistema, no se basa en la fuerza individual sino en la debilidad individual. Lo que en realidad se pide en la Iglesia de la Razón no es capacidad sino incapacidad. En ese caso es considerada "educable". Una persona verdaderamente capaz es siempre una amenaza

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To

He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness.