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You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.

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
Never
Patterns
Sense
Makes
Seems
Back
Look
Looks
Emerge
Going
Pattern

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
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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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New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Robert M. Pirsig
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What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
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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There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
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A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
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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 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
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(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Robert M. Pirsig
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The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Robert M. Pirsig
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To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Robert M. Pirsig