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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.

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
Gonna
Rules
Tablet
Bigs
Tablets
Great
Handed
Stone
Bunch
Stones
Heavy

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation
Robert M. Pirsig
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The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
Robert M. Pirsig
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I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Civilization, or the system or society or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
Robert M. Pirsig
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If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
Robert M. Pirsig
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We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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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It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig