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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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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Simple
Chemistry
Hydrogen
Years
Motive
Compounds
Billions
Professor
Mathematics
Oxygen
Group
Organize
Groups
Professors
Example
Carbon
Struggle
Stable
Nitrogen
More quotes by 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.
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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 major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
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When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
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Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
Robert M. Pirsig
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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Between the subject and the object lies the value.
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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.
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
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A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.
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I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
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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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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.
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The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
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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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Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
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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.
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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
