Robert M. Pirsig Quotes - Page 9

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."

Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.

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

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.

That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.

The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn't screw up.

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.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.

Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.

Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.

I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it, and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was 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.

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.

If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral.

You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.