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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.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Best
Traditional
Good
Method
Always
Ought
Think
Seeing
Thinking
Knowledge
Science
Hindsight
Tell
Testing
Truth
Scientific

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them 'till last.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Robert M. Pirsig
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
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What's new? is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
Robert M. Pirsig
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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
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There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
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You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.
Robert M. Pirsig
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You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
Robert M. Pirsig
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One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Robert M. Pirsig
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What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum
Robert M. Pirsig