Quote

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

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
Looks
Emerge
Going
Pattern
Never
Patterns
Sense
Makes
Seems
Back
Look

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

Image
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
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
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
…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
Image
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
Image
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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
Image
Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
If you run from technology, it will chase you.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Data without generalization is just gossip.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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