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…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

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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
Never
Buddhism
Judaism
Christianity
Taoism
Among
Fought
Holy
Statements
Differences
Wars
War
Near
Doctrinal
Reality
Islam
Presumed
Important
Anywhere
Hinduism

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.
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Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
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For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
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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
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New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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
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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
Robert M. Pirsig
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When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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?
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Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
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We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
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A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The more you look, the more you see.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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
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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
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
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From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
Robert M. Pirsig