Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

A 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.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.

An insane delusion can't be held by a group at all. A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way…. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

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 is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, its always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

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

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.

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.

We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone.

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.