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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

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
Health
Truth
Sometimes
Socially
Conformity
Sanity
Independence
Expected

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If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
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The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
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Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.
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From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
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Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
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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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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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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
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A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
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And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
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The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
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Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
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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 world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
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The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
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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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That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
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Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig