Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

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.

Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived.

The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that its peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine.

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

That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.

Quality is what you like

Pictures aren't intellectual media. Pictures are pictures. The movie business belonged to the celebrity people and they wouldn't begin to know how to portray an intellectual book like his.... But what he saw at this point was a social pattern of values, a film, devouring an intellectual pattern of values, his book. It would be a lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life. As such it would be immoral.

Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point.

I'm not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness.

as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.

And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear—the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.

A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.

Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book like this.

It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it. DeWeese

Appena arrivata credeva in cima ai grattaceli ci stessero dei tizi che vedevano tutto quello che succedeva e non sarebbero mai scesi a parlarle. Poi aveva scoperto che non c'è nessuno che sa quello che succede.

The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

Some say the good is found in happiness. But how do we know what happiness is and how can happiness be defined? If happiness and good are not objective terms, we cannot deal with them scientifically and since they aren't objective, they just exist in your mind, so if you want to be happy, you just change your mind. Ha ha ha.

The Church attitude is that civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.