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
Sense
Makes
Seems
Back
Look
Looks
Emerge
Going
Pattern
Never
Patterns

More quotes by 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
From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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
Image
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
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
…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
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
Image
What's new? is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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.
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
every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
Robert M. Pirsig