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We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
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
Endless
Awareness
Call
Around
Take
World
Handful
Sand
Landscape
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
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
If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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
What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.
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
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
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
Robert M. Pirsig
Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
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
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
Robert M. Pirsig
In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
Robert M. Pirsig
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig
It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
Robert M. Pirsig
Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Robert M. Pirsig
