Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.

It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally…mind control….

Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—TV, jets, freeways and so on—but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.

It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out.

But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.

Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.

I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.

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. Oh. After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, Dad? What? Will I have the right attitudes? I think so, I say. I don't think that will be any problem at all.

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.