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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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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
May
Kill
Shepherds
Take
Goes
Wolf
Takes
Sport
Mistake
Avoid
Sports
Relationships
Funny
Mistakes
Certain
Forgotten
Care
Dog
Shepherd

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Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
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We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time.
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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.
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
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Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
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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.
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The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them 'till last.
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
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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.
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There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
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The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
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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.
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Civilization, or the system or society or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
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One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.
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In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
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If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
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The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
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A thing that has no value does not exist.
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