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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.

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
Law
Rationality
Art
Maintenance
Reason
Functions
Really
Riding
Bikers
Entirely
Miniature
Function
Miniatures
Laws
Accordance
Study
Motorcycle

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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
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The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
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You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.
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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
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Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
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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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Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
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I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
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What's new? is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.
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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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Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
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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 place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
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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.
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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 real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.
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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.
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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.
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You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
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