Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
Robert M. Pirsig
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Inflict
Fanaticism
Extremely
Innocent
Head
Hard
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
Robert M. Pirsig
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Robert M. Pirsig
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
…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
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Robert M. Pirsig
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
Robert M. Pirsig
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Robert M. Pirsig
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
Robert M. Pirsig
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
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
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
Robert M. Pirsig
If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.
Robert M. Pirsig
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
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
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.
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
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.
Robert M. Pirsig
