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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
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
Intellectual
Learning
Quality
Abstractions
Knowledge
Prior
Experience
Abstraction
Management
Independent
Direct
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
Robert M. Pirsig
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Civilization, or the system or society or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
Robert M. Pirsig
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
Robert M. Pirsig
If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.
Robert M. Pirsig
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
Robert M. Pirsig
The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
Robert M. Pirsig
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation
Robert M. Pirsig
Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Robert M. Pirsig
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Robert M. Pirsig
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
