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

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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.
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What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.
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Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
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Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
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It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
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The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah which is to demean one's self.
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There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
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The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
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For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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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.
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In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
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Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
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Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
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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.
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Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
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Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.
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