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If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

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
Close
Wall
Week
Pretty
Stare
Morning
Nothingness
Four
Staring
Getting
Till
Night
Nine

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Robert M. Pirsig
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…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
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I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Cliches and stereotypes such as beatnik or hippie have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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
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And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Robert M. Pirsig
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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
Robert M. Pirsig
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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth. and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
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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The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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
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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