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The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

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
Always
Flunking
Students
Teacher
Best
Every
Good

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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?
Robert M. Pirsig
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Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
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If you run from technology, it will chase you.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum
Robert M. Pirsig
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Robert M. Pirsig
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I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.
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
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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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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
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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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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A thing that has no value does not exist.
Robert M. Pirsig
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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
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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Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
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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Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
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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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.
Robert M. Pirsig