Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountains which sustain life, not the top.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.

The more you look, the more you see.

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

A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

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.

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

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.

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

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.

Data without generalization is just gossip.

You are never dedicated to do 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 kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

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 Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.