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Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.

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
Called
Garbage
Dark
Delusion
Religious
Ages
Age
Insane
Anything
Intellectual
Vestige
Many
Nobody
Delusions
People
Involved
Superstitious
Knew
Mysticism

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For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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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.
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Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
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The more you look, the more you see.
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Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.
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When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
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The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
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The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
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A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
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An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
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I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
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Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
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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…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
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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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Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.
Robert M. Pirsig