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The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
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
Giving
Machines
Mind
Produce
Disturbs
Gives
Tranquility
Changed
Produces
Technology
Machine
Either
Test
Wrong
Tests
Right
Satisfaction
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
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
Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
Robert M. Pirsig
Science values static patterns.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Robert M. Pirsig
You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.
Robert M. Pirsig
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.
Robert M. Pirsig
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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
That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Robert M. Pirsig
A thing that has no value does not exist.
Robert M. Pirsig
