Robert M. Pirsig Quotes - Page 8

What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.

The sun of quality 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.

So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

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 level 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 stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.

You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.

Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation .... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority.

Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.

Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.

Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.

Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.

It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.

What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.

What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.