Quotes from Robert M. Pirsig

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.

When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.

Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.

Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too "scientific". Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. 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.

One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade

You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.

If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.

Yolculuk etmek bazen, varmaktan daha iyidir.

A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassembles and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

the idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable.

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.

I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions.

And from time to time you find your "county road" takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer's backyard.

One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. 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.