Quote

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Robert M. Pirsig

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Learning
Quality
Abstractions
Knowledge
Prior
Experience
Abstraction
Management
Independent
Direct
Intellectual

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

Image
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The more you read, the more you calm down.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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
Image
A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
Robert M. Pirsig