Quote

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

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
Never
Sight
Valleys
Like
Behinds
Mountains
People
Listen
Enter
Behind
Content
Stand
Spirituality
Spiritual
Avoid
Hardships
Lives
Thus
Valley
Others
Mountain
Hardship

More quotes by 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
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
Image
Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
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
Image
... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
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
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
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
If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
Robert M. Pirsig