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The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

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
Good
Inner
Peace
Quietness
Understand
Proceeds
Reason
Cultivate
Looks
Shine
Work
Shining
Mind
Reasons
Way
Goodness

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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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.
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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.
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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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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
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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.
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
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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?
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(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
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Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
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The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
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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.
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A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Robert M. Pirsig
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To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
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Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum
Robert M. Pirsig
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If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
Robert M. Pirsig
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The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
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It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
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If you run from technology, it will chase you.
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