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The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
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
Way
Worn
Statistics
Legal
Insight
Bones
Flesh
Personality
Around
Garments
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
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
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
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
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
Robert M. Pirsig
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
Robert M. Pirsig
Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
Robert M. Pirsig
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
Robert M. Pirsig
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig
Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
Robert M. Pirsig
Data without generalization is just gossip.
Robert M. Pirsig
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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
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
Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
Robert M. Pirsig
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
