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For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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
People
Keeper
Lighthouse
Keepers
Shouldn
Writer
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More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
Robert M. Pirsig
Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Robert M. Pirsig
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
Robert M. Pirsig
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.
Robert M. Pirsig
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?
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
The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
Robert M. Pirsig
The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die.
Robert M. Pirsig
The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
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
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
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
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Robert M. Pirsig
The more you read, the more you calm down.
Robert M. Pirsig
Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Robert M. Pirsig
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig