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Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.

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
Quality
Understanding

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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
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From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
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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Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...
Robert M. Pirsig
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
Robert M. Pirsig
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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
Robert M. Pirsig
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If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
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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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
Robert M. Pirsig
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Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.
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 truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig