Robert M. Pirsig quotes

Robert M. Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher, best known for his book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." His work explores the relationship between quality, values, and the human experience. He became a cult figure for readers interested in philosophy and the meaning of life. Here are 196 of his quotes:

The solutions all are simple-after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are. (Robert M. Pirsig)
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. (Robert M. Pirsig)
We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha-which is to demean oneself. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
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. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
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. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. (Robert M. Pirsig)
Good is a noun rather than an adjective. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things-it fits. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig