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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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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Faces
Projections
Future
Projection
Often
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Shows
Projects
Else
Face
Past
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Really
Forget
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
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
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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
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
The more you read, the more you calm down.
Robert M. Pirsig
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
Robert M. Pirsig
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.
Robert M. Pirsig
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
Robert M. Pirsig
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
