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Robert M. Pirsig Quotes about Struggle

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 Reflection Running Science Struggle quotes Technology Truth Understanding Unity Values Vision War
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Robert M. Pirsig
Struggle, Simple, Oxygen
Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.

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

Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.

Robert M. Pirsig
Struggle, Simple, Patterns
Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.

Robert M. Pirsig
Struggle, Order, People

Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry?

Robert M. Pirsig
Struggle, Fall, Simple

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

Robert M. Pirsig
Struggle, Order, People

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