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Robert M. Pirsig Quotes about Reality

All Robert M. Pirsig Quotes Acceptance Art Atheism Attitude Awareness Culture Ethics Evolution Feelings Heart Independence Insanity Knowledge Life Logic Loneliness Lying Motorcycle Mountain Past Purpose Quality Rationality Reality quotes Reflection Running Science Struggle Technology Truth Understanding Unity Values Vision War
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

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.

Robert M. Pirsig
Mean, Unique, Reality
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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.

Robert M. Pirsig
Memories, Past, Reality

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

Robert M. Pirsig
Reality, Thinking, Data

Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

Robert M. Pirsig
Reality, Vision, Moments

From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.

Robert M. Pirsig
Beach, Reality, World

The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

Robert M. Pirsig
Reality, Unity, Way
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

Robert M. Pirsig
Reality, Intellectual, Quality
Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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. . . .

Robert M. Pirsig
Jobs, Reality, Quality
Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

…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.

Robert M. Pirsig
War, Buddhism, Reality

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