Robert M. Pirsig quotes - page 6

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. (Robert M. Pirsig)
I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
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 occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Some channel deepening seems called for. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The Professor of Philosophy has made a mistake. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
A person who knows how to fix motorcycles-with Quality-is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time. (Robert M. Pirsig)
The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. (Robert M. Pirsig)
No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Uncle Tom's Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig