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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.

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
Individual
Cliche
Doe
Stereotype
People
Invented
Coining
Individuals
Beatnik
Continue
Cliches
Mass
Stereotypes
Term
Convert
Simple
Hippie

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The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah which is to demean one's self.
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Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
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Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
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It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
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Between the subject and the object lies the value.
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The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
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So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?
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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 solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
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No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
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Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
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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.
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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?
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Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
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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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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.
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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.
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You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.
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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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