Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.

If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.

Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined

Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind.

Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state.

Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.

Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.

The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat

Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn't follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do.

If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both 'Nature' and 'Nature's laws' are creations of our own imagination.

Buy good tools as you can afford them and you'll never regret it.

You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.

And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation. Phaedrus asked how. The student said they would post police to prevent it. Phaedrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about. That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast

The sun of quality," he wrote, "does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!

Il posto per migliorare il mondo è innanzitutto nel proprio cuore, nella propria testa e nelle proprie mani; è da qui che si può partire verso l'esterno.

La vera motocicletta a cui state lavorando è una moto che si chiama voi stessi. La macchina che sembra là fuori e la persona che sembra qui dentro non sono separate. Crescono insieme verso la Qualità o insieme se ne allontanano.

I break open a lunch of Swiss cheese, pepperoni and crackers. I cut up the cheese and then the pepperoni in careful, neat slices. The silence allows you to do each thing right.