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What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.

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
Much
Changing
Although
Pattern
Goes
Holds
Seen
Larger
Names
Bodies
Keep
Unity
Together
Patterns
Body
Clearly

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Data without generalization is just gossip.
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
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(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
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Between the subject and the object lies the value.
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New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
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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.
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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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An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
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Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
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The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
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Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
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The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
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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.
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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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The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
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I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
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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
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